Afrodigital, an online courses platform based in Zimbabwe, has trained 1,394 students in digital marketing and other courses since its launch in 2017.
Trust Nhokovedzo, the founder of Afrodigital, revealed these figures following the recent graduation of 55 students in Harare. This cohort had completed digital and graphic design courses, both in person and through Afrodigital’s online platform.
Nhokovedzo told Techzim their focus has been to provide practical skills, not just certificates. In the Digital Marketing Pan Degree course for example, students actively engage in creating websites, optimizing for search engines, designing flyers for campaign, running Google Ads Facebook and Instagram paid campaigns.
This hands-on approach, Nhokovedzo explains, has led many students to return for other practical courses offered by Afrodigital.
We interviewed Nhokovedzo for insights into Afrodigital’s experience as one of the few organisations providing this kind of training in the region. Below are his responses to our questions.
What is the typical student looking to achieve with this training? Are they professionals coming from companies or individuals looking to build careers as digital marketing consultants, or content creators?
They are trying to become practically good with digital marketing. What I mean by that is that Digital Marketing has been a hype for many people, where people just say “oh these things work when you know how to do it”. But when you then give people a digital marketing position in an organisation, and say Can you run a Facebook ad? Can you run a Google campaign? Do you know how to assess your website’s SEO performance? They don’t know what to do.
So what this course seeks to give to the participants is the ability to practically do things, to manage a WordPress website, to create social media content calendars, to add a business to the Google Business Profile just as a basic SEO step, the ability to run an effective email campaign and other such things.
We have professionals coming from established companies, from large financial institutions in the country all the way to small business. We also have entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses join the course to learn what to do for their businesses to grow.
We also have people coming from colleges and universities who are trying to become more employable because today there’s no marketing role advertised that doesn’t require an understanding of digital marketing, depending on the level of the job ofcourse. We also have people who want to become consultants.
Those are the kind of people who are in the our classes and they are finding it very useful.
How does the training work for this particular course?
We ask the students to assume either ownership or the Marketing Manager role of a real world business or an imaginary one. As we go through the course covering the different modules, we give students practical assignments to do in line with the business they chose.
An example is if someone has chosen a fashion boutique business, they then have to first make a website for that business. In this case an online shop – adding products, images and other things as part of their website management skills. Then doing SEO for it, adding that business to at least Google Business Profile and do product optimisation for it. As we go through the modules like content calendar creation, creating flyers and ads using Canva and other such platforms – they have to apply these things in the context of their chosen business.
We have found this very beneficial because they understands the effects of what they do on a business. Some of the things such as social media pages are actually public and students start getting calls from real clients interested in the business’s products.
You mentioned a practical approach? How is it different from a qualifications approach?
So it is different in its focus on getting the students to have practical skills. They should be able to do the things not just know what they mean. With the qualifications approach it’s normally just about information and ability to comprehend things. Our focus is on the doing.
While our courses do teach information and making students knowledgeable, it’s assessing them based on the practical things they do.
What have been the challenges of providing digital marketing training in Zimbabwe over the years?
Firstly there are a lot of misconceptions in the market about digital marketing. Most people think that social media is digital marketing – so anyone who is able to create a Facebook page or a flyer on a mobile app, and be posting, is actually a digital marketer. So there are a number of people whole feel they don’t need to be trained in digital marketing. This problem is responsible for the high rate of failure many businesses have with their digital marketing efforts.
The second one is the attitudes that companies have towards digital marketing. Many of them have been burnt in trying to go full thrust on digital marketing, having believed some hype and some things which were just not true. Companies are therefore not so willing to invest for their staff to be trained because they haven’t had results in the previous efforts. So you don’t have many companies paying for their employees. You have a lot of individuals who are personally interested who are coming through.
At the same time, when you have companies coming through, some of the students have attitude issues where they are not so willing to go through the process of learning. They have the ‘qualifications’ student attitude which is them thinking they can always do the assignments and things last minute. For practical course like ours, it’s almost impossible for you to do things last minute, because what you do during the course is what’s assessed.
The other challenge is that it’s difficult to get really practical resources in the market, that is people who really know how to do things practically. We have 2 groups of people in the digital marketing field – the first is tech geeks who know how to click things, how to make things move around, how to make websites, but the challenge with them is they don’t know the business side of things. They don’t know how these things should be used to make a business become more profitable and have an edge in the market. The other side of the river you have the marketers who know how technology should be used but they don’t know where to click and what to do. So having to bring these two together to create a very practical environment has been one of the challenges.
There are ofcourse general environmental challenges of being in Zimbabwe and being from Zimbabwe which cannot be removed from this. It’s been difficult to formalise as a training institution. When you talk to universities to partner them, they don’t understand what we’re trying to do. And when you approach the government to register they want a huge amount of money to register a private university. But we are pursuing the private university route which we hope to complete in the next 1 to 2 years.
