SAP Skills for Africa has launched its first-ever East African programme at an event held in Nairobi, Kenya.
Skills for Africa is a skills development initiative between SAP Africa, its customers, and various public and private sector partners. It focuses on training and certifying graduates in a broad spectrum of SAP software and business solutions and applications, and securing opportunities for placement at regional SAP partner and customer organisations.
According to Meena Confait, head of Skills for Africa at SAP Africa, this year features the first expanded East African programme with the participation of partners and customers from Kenya as well as Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda.
“In 2013 and 2014, we provided training for 130 graduates in Kenya. In our expanded 2017 programme, we are able to train 55 candidates of which 40% are female. This builds on our organisational goal of promoting diversity in the workplace, and makes a significant contribution to unlocking the latent potential of Africa’s sizeable female population.”
Since its inception in 2012, SAP Skills for Africa has made an invaluable contribution to the development of the world’s potentially largest talent pool by providing training and industry job placements for more than 400 consultants.
“To support the growth and success of Africa’s critical SME sector, we are proud to announce that the curriculum for East Africa now includes SAP Business One, which is already used by more than 55 000 companies to streamline processes ranging from accounting to CRM to supply chain management.
“This is one of the key success factors for the initiative: the focus on ensuring graduates learn the most relevant and business-critical skills that will immediately make them valuable contributors to the success of the partner and customer companies where they are placed.”
The launch of this year’s East African programme was held at the Kenya School of Government and brought together key role-players in the public and private sectors as well as academia.
“Kenya has over the past few years made digital skills development a national priority, with a range of initiatives driven by a number of government agencies and aimed at inspiring an affinity for technology from school level all the way to business and government. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Authority is a State Corporation that was established in 2013 to rationalise and streamline the management of all Government of Kenya ICT functions,” says Robert Mugo, CEO of the ICT Authority.