Via BizTech Africa
Uber South Africa and Uber Kenya have launched a new upskilling program targeting women drivers and their communities. The skills will enable women to become independent entrepreneurs.
Uber in partnership with the African Management Institute (AMI) will offer two personal development and entrepreneurship programs - Skills for the Future and the Micro-enterprise Accelerator.
“What’s exciting for these women entrepreneurs is that they can engage in learning on the go and gain skills they can apply to their businesses right away,” said Rebecca Harrison, CEO and co-founder of AMI.
The four-month Skills for the Future program will teach women how to manage competing priorities, effective planning, communication, managing difficult clients, and personal finance management.
The six-month Micro-enterprise Accelerator program will help women learn how to track key financial and performance business, understand the gaps in their key business processes and implement key business practices to improve and grow their business.
“Through innovative partnerships such as these, we can improve the quality and security of independent opportunities while preserving the flexibility that entrepreneur’s value." Alon Lits, Director and General Manager for Uber Sub-Saharan Africa said.
At Caribou Digital, we refer to this training as Platform-Led Transformational Upskilling. With support from the Mastercard Foundation, we explored how platforms such as Uber invest in the skills of the gig workers active on their sites, even outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship. Our research found that platforms are investing in skills that are transferable and have lifelong value, such as digital literacy, financial literacy, vocational training, and even soft skills. We believe that as this training equips people with skills that are portable to other areas of their lives and livelihoods, it has the potential to be transformational for workers and in closing the skills gap. We look forward to studying this topic further and following the results of such training from companies like Uber and AMI.
Comments