Ambrose Murangira

There are sessions where people speak, and others where the room itself speaks. The roundtable on “Moving Beyond Skills Gap: Best Practices in Disability-Inclusive Employment in Africa” was one of those rare spaces where the real conversation was not only in the formal speeches, the polished institutional statements, or the technical responses from panelists. It was also in the silences between contributions, the discomfort of employers admitting what they do not yet know, the impatience of young persons with disabilities who have heard the same promises before, and the quiet realization that perhaps Africa’s disability employment challenge has been wrongly named.

I had the privilege of chairing and co-moderating this session. That role placed me in a unique position. I was not only guiding the flow of speakers, managing time, introducing panelists, and connecting one conversation to another. I was also observing the room as a disability inclusion practitioner, as a Deaf professional, and as someone who has spent many years asking employers, development partners, governments, and institutions to move from good intentions to practical systems. From that position, I could see that the session was not simply about employment. It was about power, design, imagination, and the future of work in Africa.

For years, the dominant explanation has been that persons with disabilities are unemployed because they lack skills. It is a comfortable explanation. It places the problem in the individual, not in the institution. It tells employers that they are waiting for the “right” candidates. It tells universities that the pipeline is weak. It tells governments that training will solve the problem. It tells development partners that more skilling projects will unlock inclusion. The roundtable disturbed this comfort. The deeper message was that the skills gap may be real in some cases, but it is not the full story. In many cases, what we call a skills gap is actually a system gap.

This distinction matters. A skills gap asks, “What is missing in the person?” A system gap asks, “What is missing in the environment around the person?” A skills-gap lens looks at a young person with a disability and asks whether they are ready for work. A system-gap lens looks at the family, the school, the recruitment platform, the interview process, the inaccessible office, the manager, the budget, the policy, the data system, the career ladder, and asks whether work is ready for that person.

As chair of the session, I kept hearing the same message repeated in different voices. Employers spoke about inaccessible pipelines, lack of confidence among managers, reasonable accommodation, headcount restrictions, and bias. Young persons with disabilities spoke about inaccessible adverts, assumptions about their capacities, communication barriers, and the need to be supported rather than pitied. Development actors spoke about partnerships, tools, measurement, AI, and the gig economy. Each group used different language, but they were pointing to the same reality that the employment problem is not located only in the body or skills of persons with disabilities. It is also located in the systems that decide who is visible, who is trusted, who is supported, and who is allowed to grow.

The power of the roundtable was that it shifted the conversation from charity to design. Work was not presented as a favor to people with disabilities. It was presented as a path to income, growth, belonging, recognition, leadership, and contribution. This is a radical shift, because charity can tolerate small numbers. Charity can celebrate one intern. Charity can display a smiling employee on a brochure. Charity can be satisfied with presence. But dignity asks harder questions. Did the person earn an income? Did they grow? Did they move from internship to employment? Did the organization change? Did the team learn? Did the manager become more confident? Did the workplace become more accessible for the next person?

One of the most powerful images from the session came from a story about a child with autism in a school race. When the race began, the child spotted friends in the crowd and stopped to greet them. He continued running, then stopped again when he saw another friend. He finished the race after others had completed theirs. On the surface, it sounded like a story about difference. Beneath the surface, it was a story about how systems define success. The race had only one logic: run straight, run fast, finish first. The child had another logic: relationship, recognition, joy, social connection. The organizers had designed a race, but not inclusion.

This story stayed with me as I guided the conversation. It offered a profound lesson about employment. Many workplaces are designed like that race. They reward those who move in a straight line at a standard speed through standard recruitment systems, standard interviews, standard offices, standard probation periods, and standard performance measures. Then they call it merit. Yet what appears to be merit may often be conformity to a narrow design. Persons with disabilities are not failing to run. They are often being asked to run in systems that were never designed with their ways of moving, communicating, thinking, seeing, hearing, processing, or relating in mind.

This is where the roundtable challenged traditional thinking most strongly. Inclusion is often treated as helping people with disabilities catch up. But perhaps the deeper work is to question the race itself. Who designed it? Who set the rules? Who benefits from the current pace? Who is excluded when the system scales too quickly? One speaker warned against “reproducing exclusivity by scale.” That phrase deserves serious attention. It means that scale is not inherently good. A program can scale exclusion. A digital platform can scale exclusion. AI can scale exclusion. A gig economy can scale exclusion. Even an employment initiative with good intentions can scale exclusion if it grows faster than its inclusion architecture.

This is an uncomfortable idea for development practice, because we often celebrate scale as success. We ask how many young people were reached, how many employers were engaged, how many tools were created, and how many platforms were launched. The roundtable suggested that the better question is not only “How many?” but also “Under what conditions?” If one million young people with disabilities are reached through systems that remain inaccessible, precarious, poorly regulated, and biased, then scale becomes a beautiful word that hides an old injustice. Scale must therefore be deliberate. It must be designed. It must be accountable. It must be measured not only by reach but by dignity.

As I listened to employers, I also observed something rarely said openly. Employers are not only excluding people with disabilities. Many are also trapped by their own systems. Some want to hire, but their recruitment platforms are inaccessible. Some want to accommodate, but their budgets do not account for reasonable accommodation. Some want to include, but their managers fear making mistakes. Some want talent, but their job descriptions are too rigid. Some want diversity, but their headcount controls do not allow them to convert interns into employees. Some want innovation, but they still treat people with disabilities as a compliance category rather than a source of business value.

This leads to a second unconventional insight: disability inclusion is not only about preparing people with disabilities for employers. It is also about preparing employers for people with disabilities. For too long, the burden of readiness has been placed on the candidate. The young person must be trained, confident, resilient, qualified, polished, and able to explain their support needs without making the employer uncomfortable. Yet the employer may not be ready. The manager may not know how to supervise inclusively. The team may not know how to communicate. The office may not be accessible. The HR system may not know how to process accommodation requests confidentially. The organization may not have data to determine whether its inclusion efforts are working.

This is why the manager emerged, quietly yet powerfully, as one of the most important actors in disability-inclusive employment. Policies may be written at headquarters, but inclusion is often decided at the manager’s desk. The manager decides whether to shortlist, interview, accommodate, extend an internship, recommend permanent employment, trust the candidate, or see potential rather than risk. The manager becomes the workplace gatekeeper. In that sense, disability inclusion is not only a policy issue. It is a daily administrative practice. It lives in small decisions.

The contribution on confidential accommodation and measurement brought this point into focus. It is not enough to say that an organization supports inclusion. The organization must know whether candidates receive accommodations, whether they are satisfied with them, how long it takes to provide them, how many events are accessible, and where barriers remain. This shifts inclusion from moral language to managerial accountability. It also challenges another conventional belief: that passion is enough. Passion may open the door, but data keeps it open. Goodwill can start a conversation, but measurement shows whether the conversation has changed anything.

The employers in the room also dispelled the myth that internships are automatically pathways to employment. Internships can be bridges, but they can also become holding spaces. They can prepare young people with disabilities for work, but they can also allow organizations to display inclusion without changing their workforce. The difference lies in intention. When an internship is designed as charity, it ends with appreciation. When it is designed as talent development, it includes a pathway, mentorship, support, performance feedback, and a realistic possibility of transition. This is where one employer’s statement was important in that support must begin before the internship. The candidate should not arrive at the workplace only to encounter systems that were never prepared.

Another important idea emerged from the discussion of the education pipeline. One employer noted that some families still do not encourage children with disabilities to pursue technology or STEM pathways. Universities may have laboratories on upper floors that are inaccessible. This is often treated as an educational issue, but it is also an employment issue. The workplace begins long before the job advert. It begins in the family’s imagination, in the school timetable, in the classroom seating arrangement, in the inaccessible laboratory, in the career advice session, in the internship placement office, and in the social message about who belongs in technology, aviation, finance, research, or leadership. When persons with disabilities are absent from certain sectors, that absence may have been produced years before the employer says, “We cannot find qualified candidates.”

The session’s discussion on AI added another layer of complexity. As co-moderator, I was particularly interested in this part because AI is now entering spaces where entry-level workers, interns, and young professionals used to learn by doing. I raised the concern that if interns used to begin by taking minutes, drafting reports, or doing basic administrative work, what happens when AI takes over those initial learning tasks? What then becomes the first step into the workplace? This is not a small question. It forces us to ask whether AI will open new doors for people with disabilities or quietly remove the ladders through which many young people enter the workforce.

AI was neither treated as a miracle nor dismissed as a threat. It was presented as a contested space. On the one hand, AI can help workers produce faster, summarize information, communicate more effectively, analyze data, and access opportunities. It can reduce the need for certain technical skills and enable more people to participate in knowledge work. It can support recruitment, workplace adjustments, and productivity. For some people with disabilities, AI may become a practical tool for reducing barriers.

On the other hand, the session warned against the dangerous assumption that technology naturally equalizes. It does not. Technology reflects the values of the systems that design, fund, train, deploy, and regulate it. AI can support inclusion, but it can also automate exclusion. If recruitment algorithms are trained on biased histories, they may reproduce old patterns at greater speed. If AI tools scrape career pages and an organization has not clearly communicated its disability-inclusion commitments, candidates with disabilities may never build enough trust to apply. If entry-level tasks are automated, young people with disabilities may lose the very first steps through which many people traditionally learn to work. If gig workers train AI systems that later replace their tasks, the digital economy becomes not a ladder but a machine that feeds on their labor.

The discussion of “human in the loop” was especially important. It challenged the glamorous language around AI work. Behind many AI systems are workers who label data, moderate content, transcribe, test, correct, and train systems. Some of this work is framed as an opportunity. Yet the roundtable raised a harder question: what is the quality of this work? Is it dignified? Is it protected? Does it offer growth? Does it move workers up the value chain, or does it keep them at the lowest, most invisible layer of the AI economy? This is a crucial question for people with disabilities. Inclusion in poor work is not justice. Access to exploitation is not empowerment. Digital inclusion must therefore be judged not only by access to platforms but also by the dignity, protection, income, voice, and future those platforms provide.

The gig economy produced similar tensions. It was described as flexible, diverse, and broader than ride-hailing or delivery work. It includes online freelancing, content creation, digital services, micro-enterprises, e-commerce, and agent-based work. For people with disabilities, this flexibility can reduce some barriers to formal employment. There may be no traditional HR gatekeeper, no formal interview panel, and no office building to enter every morning. In that sense, gig work may open doors.

Yet the absence of HR is both an opportunity and a danger. Formal employment can exclude through bureaucracy. Gig work can exclude through invisibility. In formal employment, a person may request reasonable accommodation. In gig work, who receives that request? In formal employment, labor protections may exist. In gig work, who guarantees fair pay, accessible platforms, dispute resolution, accessible payment systems, or protection from algorithmic punishment? When a worker is blocked by a platform, misrated by a client, unable to complete inaccessible registration, or excluded from digital payment because of documentation barriers, who is accountable? The gig economy may remove some old walls, but it can also create new walls without doors.

One young speaker distilled barriers to gig work into a simple framework: attitude, accessibility, communication, and policy. This was not just a list. It was a theory of exclusion. Accessibility determines whether one can enter. Communication determines whether one can understand and be understood. Attitude determines whether one is trusted. Policy determines whether inclusion survives beyond goodwill. Together, these four elements show that digital work is never purely digital. It is social, political, economic, and deeply human.

The tools panel also revealed another hidden tension. Many tools are available: self-assessment tools, inclusive employment toolboxes, policy audits, how-to guides, learning platforms, business and disability networks, and good practice resources. Yet the presence of tools does not guarantee transformation. A tool can sit in an office, be praised in a workshop, shared via a QR code, and still fail to change recruitment. The real question is not whether tools exist. The question is whether tools have owners, budgets, timelines, accountability, and consequences. A checklist without leadership is paper. A policy without a manager’s confidence is decoration. A dashboard without action is a mirror that nobody wants to look into.

Perhaps the most important latent message of the session was that disability inclusion is shifting from the language of access to the language of power. Access asks whether persons with disabilities can enter the workplace. Power asks whether they can shape it. Access asks whether they can apply. Power asks whether they can influence the design of recruitment. Access asks whether they can receive accommodations. Power asks whether they can define what accommodations mean. Access asks whether they can be hired. Power asks whether they can be promoted, lead teams, design tools, challenge policy, and transform systems.

This is why the role of organizations of persons with disabilities remains central. They are not merely outreach channels to help employers find candidates. They are knowledge institutions that carry lived experience, community trust, political memory, and practical understanding of barriers that employers may not see. When employers and platform designers engage OPDs only at the end, they ask them to repair exclusion after the design. When they engage OPDs from the beginning, they make inclusion part of design itself.

As I chaired and co-moderated the session, I also saw the value of having persons with disabilities not only as speakers but as shapers of the conversation. This matters. Too often, persons with disabilities are invited to panels to give testimony, while others provide the analysis. In this session, the structure itself challenged that pattern. Lived experience was not treated as an emotional add-on. It was a form of expertise. It helped interpret employer behavior, question technology, test the meaning of decent work, and push the room beyond comfortable answers.

The roundtable left me with a different understanding of disability-inclusive employment in Africa. The challenge is not simply that persons with disabilities need skills. The challenge is that systems need humility. Employers must admit that talent may already exist beyond their imagination. Development partners must admit that scale without design can reproduce exclusion. Technology actors must admit that AI is not neutral. Governments must admit that policy without implementation is a promise without a pathway. HR leaders must admit that recruitment can be inaccessible even when it appears open. And all of us must admit that good intentions are not the same as good systems.

Moving beyond the skills gap requires moving beyond the habit of locating the problem in persons with disabilities. It means asking whether our workplaces are brave enough to change. It means seeing reasonable accommodation not as a cost but as infrastructure for talent. It means treating internships not as symbolic opportunities but as intentional bridges. It means measuring inclusion not by stories alone but by data, retention, promotion, satisfaction, accessibility, and dignity. It means designing AI and gig platforms with persons with disabilities, not merely for them. It means understanding that the future of work will not be inclusive simply because it is digital.

The future of work in Africa is being built now. It is being built in boardrooms, ministries, universities, platforms, HR departments, innovation hubs, OPD offices, and on gig workers’ phones. The question is not whether people with disabilities are ready for that future. Many are already ready, and many more can be ready when systems stop disabling their pathways. The real question is whether the future being built is ready for them.

That is the deeper lesson I took from chairing and co-moderating this roundtable. The skills gap is not the gap. The gap is imagination. The gap is design. The gap is accountability. The gap is the distance between inclusion as a speech and inclusion as a system. Until that gap is closed, Africa will continue to miss talent already in the room, waiting not for charity but for a fair chance to contribute.

#IAC #InclusiveEmployment #DisabilityInclusiveEmployment #MindsetChange #DisabiityInclusion #BeyondSkillsGap