Skills gap meets jobs gap: BluLever bets on trades

For many young South Africans, the hardest part of the job market is the gap between having no work and having no skills. A Johannesburg-based education company is betting that closing that gap lies in the trades, and its co-founder has now been recognised among the most promising entrepreneurs on the continent.

Jess Roussos, co-founder and co-CEO of BluLever Education, is one of the top 10 finalists in the 2026 Africa’s Business Heroes entrepreneurship competition. Her company trains plumbers, electricians and other artisans, addressing a shortage that affects households and businesses alike. As artificial intelligence reshapes the labour market, plumbing is frequently cited as one of the occupations unlikely to be replaced by tools like Claude or Gemini any time soon. A recent article on the topic, published at https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/p/ai-is-unlikely-to-replace-plumbers, notes that BluLever is building a business around training people for exactly this kind of work.

The public stakes are straightforward. South Africa has large numbers of unemployed young people, while businesses such as plumbing and electrical contractors struggle to find skilled workers. According to Roussos, many existing technical and vocational training institutions were not equipping students with the skills employers needed. BluLever was founded in 2018 to sit in that gap, preparing people for work that keeps water running, power flowing and buildings functioning.

The company’s origins trace back to the African Leadership University (ALU) in Mauritius, a private higher education network founded by entrepreneur Fred Swaniker in 2015 with campuses in Mauritius and Rwanda. Roussos, who is South African-born, spent about four years there in several roles including marketing. Her future co-founder, Adam Collier, also worked at ALU. When both wanted to do something new, they carried with them what Roussos describes as a blueprint for building and scaling an education startup.

Rather than launching immediately, the founders spent their first months researching the artisan sector and published their findings in a document called The Artisan Report. They also organised a conference that brought together a range of industry stakeholders. In 2020, they hired a small team and began running short training programmes, which gave them hands-on experience of working with tradespeople. The following year, BluLever opened its first campus in a rented building in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and enrolled 30 students in its three-year plumbing apprenticeship programme.

The model is designed so that learning and earning happen side by side. Apprentices spend about a third of their time on campus and the rest working for an employer, who pays them while they learn on the job. Beyond technical subjects, the curriculum covers soft skills such as communication, project management and entrepreneurship. After three years, BluLever outgrew its first campus and moved to a larger building down the road. It has since added electrical, automotive and solar apprenticeship programmes and opened a campus in Cape Town.

Access to training, meanwhile, depends on who can pay for it, and BluLever has built several funding routes. The plumbing apprenticeship costs R130,000 (about $7,900) over three years, while the electrical and automotive programmes are priced at R145,000 (about $8,800). BluLever sources bursaries and scholarships for those who cannot afford the fees, while others use student financing or have their tuition covered by their employer. “Generally what will happen is that most apprentices will have a blend of these,” Roussos explains. “They might have, for example, a 60% or 70% bursary, and then the other 30% either they are paying, their employer is paying, or they get a bank loan.”

The founders initially funded the business with their own savings and raised a small amount from family and friends to open the first campus. In 2023, BluLever secured an equity seed round from four institutional impact investors: the Elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization, the Autodesk Foundation, the Oppenheimer Generations Foundation and A to Z Impact. The company is now raising another round, which Roussos says will allow it to open a third and fourth campus.

To date, more than 700 apprentices have enrolled across BluLever’s programmes. The biggest obstacle to reaching the scale the company is aiming for, according to Roussos, is the cost and time involved in setting up physical campuses. “We started thinking about how we can get away from having to do that ourselves,” she says. The founders’ answer is to offer the BluLever model through existing vocational training institutions, which could see the company operating government technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges, or training centres run by private companies.

In a conversation with Jaco Maritz, editor-in-chief of How we made it in Africa, Roussos also reflected on the challenges BluLever has faced, the lessons learnt along the way, and the broader business opportunities in Africa’s education sector. For the young people moving through its campuses, the payoff is concrete: a paid apprenticeship, a recognised trade, and skills that employers are actively looking for. Whether the TVET partnership route can carry that payoff to many more of them remains the open question.