Kenya’s Africa 118 bagged the 2018 Google Digital skills award for the company’s efforts in committing to training over 160,000 small and medium (SME) businesses in Kenya on the effective use of the Internet to grow their businesses and achieving it.
Accepting the award, Africa 118’s head of Market Intelligence, Fred Imbo said that it is a testament that more and more customers are coming online, more Kenyan businesses are eager to join and serve them there. “This is a big morale booster given the amount of work the Africa 118 team have put in, traversing the country and delivering trainings on digital skills to businesses. It also portrays our reliability as a strategic Google partner in the region, which we are proud of,” he said.
The Google Digital Skills for Africa is an initiative by the technology giant, Google. The goal of the program is to be a catalyst for Africa’s digital transformation and thus, help train the participants on how to leverage on the web to grow their businesses/firms.
One million jobseekers, entrepreneurs and SMBs/SMEs have successfully been trained under phase one of the program. The second segment of the program 2018 – 2022 seeks to train 10 million Africans as announced by Google CEO in July 2017 at the Lagos Summit.
The key focus of Africa 118 is to provide digital marketing services to help individuals and SMEs to leverage the power of the Internet to grow. Africa 118 has one of the largest and most accurate database of SMEs in Sub Sahara Africa and has established extensive partnerships with leading associations/ players in the region including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Safaricom and Airtel among others which means active sustained engagement with the SMEs across the region.
