Facing the Future of GBS and Digital Work

 2 April 2026

The GBS and Digital sectors have been identified as a generator of an outsized proportion of youth employment opportunities. With the GBS and Digital Jobs Project, delivered in partnership with Mastercard Foundation, targeting the creation of 200,000 digital and GBS jobs in Rwanda and South Africa by 2030, these sectors must continue to be the focus of acute analysis to ensure the continent’s most excluded youth benefit from its growth. Three research pieces and a guide to hiring youth with disabilities have been developed under the GBS and Digital Jobs Project and are now available to inform any and all future interventions in this promising sector.

In the urgent quest to create more job opportunities, we need to ensure that the quality of these jobs remains high enough to offer decent and dignified work to young people. Drawing on a survey of 751 youth who were placed into GBS roles in 2023, the Decent Work Learning Report interrogates employment conditions in contact centres and examines whether the sector can generate decent work. The report finds that while the sector is characterised by high job churn, labour market retention remains strong a possible reflection of upward mobility that helps anchor young people in the formal economy. The report shows that many GBS employers also offer social protection benefits beyond legal requirements and these extend to employee wellbeing. Responding to these and many other insights in the report, several policy recommendations are made for strengthening labour protections, and decent work standards in GBS.

The body of evidence showing the impact of GBS and Digital roles on youth livelihoods is well established, and growing, but a new learning product takes a broader view. Transformative Impact: Youth in South Africa’s GBS and DigitalSectors draws on multiple data sources to show not only how these roles transform career opportunities for youth but have also served as engines of vast socio-economic transformation in the country. These roles deliver benefits for employers and have transformed the employment landscape. They also support families and communities, with research showing that a single employed person in the GBS and Digital sectors can support between three and ten dependents.

The increasing integration of AI into the GBS and Digital sectors presents both significant opportunities and the critical need to transform jobs for human-AI collaboration. A new study – Skilling Revolution: Embracing AI-driven change in the GBS and Digital Sector – finds that over 40% of current tasks in Africa’s Business Process Outsourcing and Information Technology-Enabled Services Sources sectors are susceptible to automation and demand a re-engineering of business processes. This will disproportionately affect youth as most changes will occur in junior, entry-level positions. However, the largest projected impact of AI, the study finds, is not job replacement but, rather, augmentation of roles and an increase in worker productivity. The study analyses these and many other changes that are predicted to fundamentally shift employer demands and approaches to skilling.

The true value of research is shown in its practical application. We encourage our stakeholders in the GBS and Digital sectors to lean on this research and use it to bolster the important work they do.