Inside Jumia's Bet on Young African Entrepreneurs

Every July, World Youth Skills Day turns global attention to a simple but urgent question: how do we equip young people with the practical tools to build their own livelihoods? Nowhere is that question more pressing, or more actively being answered, than in Africa, home to the world's youngest population and a fast-growing digital economy still finding its footing.

For Jumia, one of the continent's largest e-commerce platforms, the answer has taken the shape of a quiet but sustained investment: training. Long before "e-commerce" became a familiar term to many consumers in Africa,

the company was already working to build the skills, trust and infrastructure the sector would eventually depend on.

That story of skills-building offers a timely reminder of what training looks like in practice: equipping young entrepreneurs with the digital know-how to build sustainable businesses.

When we started in 2012, there was no e-commerce in Africa, and Jumia had to educate the market, the vendors, the customers, and the logistics partners about this new way to trade through the internet. Trust and education were key to our success.

Training is a key part of our education campaign for vendors, covering digital marketing, online business tools, packaging, payment processes, consumer protection, and more. We even created a vendor platform to support them.

Offline Seller training in Nigeria

Why This Matters for Youth

Africa has one of the youngest populations in the world, with 19 years old as an average, and for many young people, the barrier to entrepreneurship isn't ambition, it's access. Access to markets, access to logistics, access to digital tools, and critically, access to the practical know-how required to run an online business successfully.

Jumia's vendor training sessions are designed to close that gap. Many participants are young, first-time entrepreneurs, and the sessions walk them through the fundamentals of online selling, from listing products and managing orders to understanding customer service and delivery logistics, lowering the barrier to entry into e-commerce.

The scale and consistency of these sessions suggest a sustained, rather than one-off, commitment to vendor capacity building. For young people looking to formalise or scale an existing hustle into a functioning online business, this kind of structured support can be the difference between a stalled idea and a viable enterprise.

Across its markets, Jumia runs a structured vendor training programme that delivered close to 1,000 online and offline sessions in 2025, an average of 80 sessions every month. These sessions are spread across the continent, led by Côte d'Ivoire, followed by Nigeria, Kenya, then Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, China, Senegal, and Uganda.

Offline Seller training in Egypt

Looking Ahead

On a day dedicated to celebrating skills as a pathway to opportunity for young people, initiatives like this are worth highlighting, not because they solve youth unemployment or informality overnight, but because they represent one practical, scalable way that private-sector infrastructure can be turned toward youth economic inclusion.

As Africa's digital economy continues to grow, the vendors trained on digital today, many of them young people testing their first real business idea, could well become the merchants, logistics partners and entrepreneurs driving the continent's next phase of e-commerce growth in the continent..

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Sara Elanwar

Regional Seller Engagement Manager, Jumia

Sara Elanwar joined Jumia in 2018 as a Vendor Support Agent in Egypt and has grown through several roles across Vendor Operations, including Training Team Lead and Vendor Service Manager, driving improvements in vendor satisfaction and operational performance.

In 2023, she transitioned to the Commercial Seller Management team, where she now serves as Regional Seller Engagement Manager. In this role, Sara works with teams across Jumia to strengthen seller education through webinars, seller events, AI-powered learning content, and data-driven communication strategies that enhance seller engagement and support major campaigns such as Black Friday.

Sara holds a Bachelor's degree in Accounting from Ain Shams University and has built her entire professional career at Jumia.