TuConnect: An Inclusive AI Career Ecosystem Connecting African Youth to Fair Employment

Youth unemployment in Africa is not only a shortage of jobs; it is also a matching and readiness problem. Qualified young people are filtered out by opaque screening software, receive no feedback on why, and arrive at interviews without ever having practised one. Those with the fewest resources lose most: first-generation graduates, young people outside major cities, TVET and bootcamp graduates, career changers and women returning to work. Career offices are stretched and can rarely offer every learner a realistic mock interview, while generic AI chatbots give advice that is not grounded in the real job or the candidate's own words. On the employer side, unstructured, instinct-led shortlisting lets bias go unchecked. Policymakers and institutions lack evidence on where young people fall out of the hiring journey, so employability programmes are designed without data on the final steps to a job.

1. Give every African job seeker, starting in Kenya, affordable AI support from first CV to final interview.
2. Partner with universities, TVET colleges, bootcamps and youth employment programmes to fund access for whole cohorts, prioritising learners who cannot pay.
3. Promote fair, structured, evidence-based hiring among employers.
4. Hold our AI to transparent scoring, privacy by design and fairness testing across accents and backgrounds.
5. Share anonymised, aggregate insights with institutions and policymakers to inform employability policy and curricula.
6. Expand across East Africa.