Google To Train 1 Million People In Africa

So Google just did a Tony Elumelu and announced that it intends to train one million young Africans in digital skills in the next year. (Did you say Woow? Yeah, we did too!)

The announcement was made at a press conference in Johannesburg yesterday where the U.S. tech giant laid out its plans to scale up its digital skills training programmes to accommodate a million people from Africa in the next year, It is their hope that this will help to deal with high unemployment numbers on the continent. According to Google South Africa Country Head, Luke Mckend, “We hope that the people trained will become pioneers in the field and do great things in digital for companies and for Google.”

Google plans to train 300,000 South Africans, 400,000 Nigerians and 200,000 Kenyans, while another 100,000 people will be selected from other sub-Saharan Africa countries.

The company has partnered with Livity Africa to run two training programs: ‘Digify Bytes’ to give digital skills to young people looking to develop a digital career; and ‘Digify Pro’, a 3-month immersion program for digital specialists. training programmes. Google is rolling out a new online education portal. “We’re also talking to a number of other potential partners across Africa with a view to scaling the digital skills training programme and helping to reach even more young people in more countries,” Google said in a statement.

A group of 65 volunteer Googlers from around the world are helping the Livity team with content development, ‘training the trainers’ and, in some cases, delivering the training sessions.. The launch of digifyafrica.com – an online-learning portal that will house a range of digital skills courses, available to anyone in Africa – free. The courses are designed to be as “light” as possible so they don’t eat up valuable data. There are nine training courses already available and Google aims to have 50 available by July.

According to Luke McKend Country Director, South Africa: “The internet is at the heart of economic growth and the Digital Skills Program is aimed at helping more Africans play a part in the digital economy. Everyone can succeed online, start a new business, grow their existing one, or share their passion.”

This announcement comes on the heals of a similar announcement in February that Google had trained one million Europeans in digital skills and are committed to training another million by the end of 2017.

Culled from Bloomberg.com, itnewsafrica.com, MG Africa

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