Microsoft today introduced the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative, which will see the company work to help accelerate economic and entrepreneurial growth in Africa to improve African competitiveness and grow its influence in the global marketplace.
By 2016, the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative will have placed millions of smart devices in the hands of African youth and helped bring myriad small and medium African enterprises (SMEs) online, while addressing the growing need for the development of skills for entrepreneurship and employability. South Africa is expected to benefit directly through tens of thousands of smart devices and 600 new start-up companies.
“The 4Afrika initiative is a way for us at Microsoft to make a real difference. It is built on the dual beliefs that technology can accelerate growth for Africa, and Africa can also accelerate technology for the world,” said Mteto Nyati, managing director at Microsoft South Africa. “With these investments, our goal is to empower African students, entrepreneurs, developers, business and community leaders to own their potential and grow their influence by helping them turn great ideas into a reality that can help their village, their country, the continent, and beyond.”
As a first critical step toward accelerating the adoption of smart devices, Microsoft and Huawei are introducing the Huawei 4Afrika smartphone - a fully functional Windows 8 Phone, which will come pre-loaded with select applications designed for Africa. The phone will be available in Angola, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa later this month and will be priced around $150 (USD) in equivalent local currency. The Huawei 4Afrika phone, which is the first in what will be a series of smart devices designed “4Afrika”, will be targeted towards university students, developers and first-time smart phone users to ensure they have affordable access to best-in-class technology, enabling them to connect, collaborate, and access markets and opportunities online.
To help empower South African SMEs, Microsoft is announcing a new online hub through which SMEs will have access to free, relevant products and services from Microsoft and other partners. The hub will aggregate the available services which can help them expand their business locally, find new business opportunities outside their immediate geography, and increase their overall competitiveness. As a “welcome offer”, Microsoft will provide free domain registration for the period of one year and free tools for SMEs interested in creating a professional web presence. The hub is expected to open in April in South Africa.
The 4Afrika initiative will be tightly connected to Microsoft's network of more than 10 000 existing partners in Africa today, a network it has built over 20 years of operations on the continent. The 4Afrika Initiative will leverage these existing partnerships and create new ones across both the public and private sectors to help advance common goals and to create value for Africans.
Together with its partners, Microsoft will be using its resources and investments from 4Afrika and the Jobs Fund to dramatically scale up two of its tried and tested local initiatives - Student2Business (S2B) and BizSpark. S2B is a joint initiative by Microsoft and the MICT SETA (previously the ISETT SETA) that aims to give young people the real-world skills they need to get jobs by placing unemployed graduates with partner companies, while giving them on-the-job training. More than 3 500 graduates and 1 500 matriculants have been trained in the past three years, of whom 70% are today gainfully employed.
Microsoft's BizSpark programme supports software start-ups by giving them quick and easy access to Microsoft development tools and production licences for server products, with no upfront costs and minimal obligations. Through the additional investment from 4Afrika, the company aims to create and support at least 600 technology start-ups over the next three years. This will create an estimated 1 800 new jobs.
Another initiative launched under the 4Afrika umbrella is AppFactory, which will see Microsoft hire 30 paid student interns to build locally-relevant Windows applications (Windows 8 or Windows Phone) based on suggestions from the South African public. Already, 73 Windows apps and 29 Windows Phone apps have been built by the AppFactory teams, and at full capacity, the teams plan to contribute around 90 new apps to the Windows Store per month.
For more information, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/4Afrika.
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