Transformational Upskilling: The Case Studies

Case study: FarmAgric

Why this Nigerian for-profit ag-platform built a separate non-profit entity for training

FarmAgric is a Nigerian ag-tech company that provides smallholder farmers with capital and inputs to grow their businesses using money raised through crowdfunding. In doing so, they are enabling the next generation of farmers to expand their operations and increase their revenue, while also contributing to youth employment.

FarmAgric Foundation for Agriculture

In 2019, FarmAgric founded the FarmAgric Foundation for Agriculture, which aims to provide farmers receiving their loans with training, grants, and hands-on internships. This support helps farmers improve their productivity, which directly supports FarmAgric’s goals of providing investors with good returns and farmers with better yields. The company’s decision to set up a separate non-profit entity focused on training was strategic; they found that absorbing the cost of training into their core business was negatively impacting their gross margin.
“Once you add the budget to train people to your books, it makes it seem like that venture was not as profitable.” Francis Eke Metoho, FarmAgric Co-Founder and Chairman of FarmAgric Foundation for Agriculture

Funding this training from a separate entity enables FarmAgric to limit assessment of business health to direct costs and to raise funds from donors who prefer to grant to nonprofits. This decision illustrates the high cost of training — particularly when targeting groups with low skill levels — and how it threatens platform business models. It demonstrates the importance of government- or donor-led support in skills development to support digital livelihoods.

FarmAgric’s Training Approaches

The FarmAgric Foundation works with two distinct farming populations: rural farmers and “agripreneurs.”

Rural Farmers

According to FarmAgric, most rural farmers do not own smartphones; they also lack the literacy skills to understand training content. To address these limitations, the Foundation provides them with individual or group training delivered by extension agents qualified in agricultural science.

• Group Training: Rural farmers are organized into clusters prior to the growing season and are matched with extension agents equipped with a smartphone. Agents convene groups of farmers to present a series of videos on practical agricultural practices.
• Individual Training:FarmAgric uses GIS to gather farm-level data to enable customized advice. Agents have access to a database of targeted best practices that they can share with the farmers to help the latter easily identify and manage farming issues.

Agripreneurs

Agripreneurs are more educated, tech-savvy farmers with access to the internet, therefore requiring a different set of training interventions. The latest agripreneurs’ training — the Agricultural Skills Acquisition Program (ASAP) delivered in partnership with GIZ — has trained close to 400 farmers aged 18 to 35, 150 of whom were female. Through the year-long program, agripreneurs were trained face-to-face on good agricultural practices and given access to an online Farmer Business School. This blend of online and offline learning was complemented by WhatsApp groups that provided farmers with additional peer support. They were also introduced to farming cooperatives and had the opportunity to join an incubation program to gain access to internships on well-established farms. Financial aid was available to high-performing trainees.

“Couple investment with skills training and you have a perfect system. We have over-skilled farmers without the necessary investment to build their farms.”

Francis Eke Metoho, FarmAgric Co-Founder

Challenges with Training and Retention

The FarmAgric Foundation faced several difficulties in conducting the training. It was challenging, for example, to measure and track the impact of the training on rural farmers. The cost of the physical training also became an issue. Farmers expected food, transportation, and souvenirs in exchange for their attendance. Translators were also often needed to help extension agents deliver the training content. The Foundation is still figuring out how to digitize their face-to-face training curricula to make it more cost-effective and COVID-19 safe.

Monitoring agripreneurs’ progress is less of a challenge. After the farmers have completed their training, periodic assessments were carried out on their farms.

Unfortunately, the length of the ASAP training has proven difficult for many participants. There were high attrition rates after one month of training. Agripreneurs also expressed demand for other skills, including more emphasis on digital marketing, project management, and communication. It highlighted content gaps in the course.

Case study: ShapShap

How This Delivery Company is Focusing on Rider Behavior and Research to Make Business Decisions

Research-Focused Approach to Building a Logistics Company
ShapShap, a logistics and delivery company in Nigeria, was established in January 2020 after two years of operational research to understand Nigeria’s delivery market. This initial research revealed that many delivery companies do not adequately balance supply and demand, either growing their customer base more quickly than they can supply bikes and train riders, or having too many riders who cannot earn enough money from the number of customers registered. It also found that many customers had had bad experiences with long waiting times and poor customer service.

With these findings in mind, ShapShap tested various ways of incentivizing riders to provide excellent service. They experimented with both salary and commission-based remuneration, as well as a hybrid of the two, and invested heavily in training.

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Leveraging an App to Provide In-Workflow Training Moments
ShapShap requires that all riders pass an initial in-person training that includes how to communicate with customers and how to maintain health and safety. Subsequent training and testing relies heavily on the rider app, and failed tests can result in in-person re-training or riders being removed from the system.

ShapShap CEO Khalil Halilu – “Technology is good, but the human connection is key.”

Riders receive bi-weekly training modules on customer relationships and well-being. The company also developed a COVID-19 specific training about contactless deliveries, wearing masks, and social distancing.

Riders are expected to log in to their app account daily. They cannot accept jobs via the platform before they complete a set of wellness and health reminders in the app, such as making sure they are well-rested, and have observed proper hygiene and followed COVID-19 compliance advice.

Case study: Bellafricana

This Membership for Creative Product Founders Generates Low-Cost Training Using Its Network

Building an Ecosystem for Creative Businesses
Bukky Asehinde, Bellafricana co-founder and CEO, wants to build a supportive community where creative producers can grow their business by connecting with local and global consumers. She is bringing this vision alive with Bellafricana, an online directory for creative companies to showcase their products to customers.

Bellafricana specializes in clothing; skin and hair care products; leather goods; food products and snacks; and arts, crafts, and home decor products. Sales are not executed on the platform; customers click through to the companies’ websites and social media pages to make purchases. The platform has over 1,000 businesses listed, over 75% of which are run by people under 35 years old and 95% of which are run by women.​

Bellafricana monetizes through membership fees, in exchange for which, companies can list their products on the online directory and receive other benefits, including training.

Training focused on practical application for small businesses

Bellafricana’s training aims to help companies create marketable and exportable products. It provides an online portal through which members can access training and tools to help them register their businesses, learn about good business practices — such as pricing and standard operating procedures — and access practical resources such as worksheets, templates, and checklists. Content covers soft skills, hard business skills, and creative skills. On average, active members spend two hours daily and 14 hours weekly on the platform. Bellafricana also regularly engages with its members on WhatsApp and Telegram.

Bellafricana has found that getting feedback from members is important in developing training modules that are relevant and impactful. They solicit feedback from members on training quality and usefulness, and how people intend to apply what they have learned. The company has found that their members particularly request training in sales, marketing, and customer service. Since COVID-19, the need to create an effective virtual customer experience has also been significant.

“People who make creative products are self-talented and love to create but don’t always take the time to build that business up. There is not a lot of focus on structure and building good customer experience, which are both key elements to making a business thrive.” Bukky Asehinde, Bellafricana Co-founder and CEO

Periodically, they also ask members how the training and the platform, in general, has impacted member businesses, for instance, in sales volume, visibility, and even empowerment.

Masterclasses and the value of community in small business training

A lot of the training Bellafricana offers is provided through masterclasses, whereby local influencers and thought leaders provide live webinar-based sessions providing tips and guidance on a particular topic (recordings of the sessions are shared on the portal). What is interesting about this model is that it leans on the power of the community: influencers offer the classes for free or at a very low cost because, for them, this is a business opportunity, a chance to market their services to hundreds of small businesses. An SEO expert, for example, can provide a class and generate new business from Bellafricana members who might need her services. This model enables Bellafricana to run a lean training offering, which, in itself, becomes a marketplace.

“We leverage on the fact that we have a community. Many of these experts have offered their services to our members at outrageously discounted rates. That’s the power of numbers.” Bukky Asehinde, Bellafricana Co-founder and CEO

Masterclass topics are diverse and based on member feedback. Currently, topics include financial planning, Instagram use, product photography, product costing, legal and corporate governance, export, mentorship, pitching and storytelling, and hiring a digital team.

How Bellafricana helps fill skills gaps

Leveraging the power of influencers and the creative community is a unique approach to platform-led upskilling, which brings value to members while keeping costs low for Bellafricana. It enables sellers on the platform to learn key skills to optimize their businesses, creates mentoring relationships, and drives more traffic and momentum to the Bellafricana platform.

Case study: Chalkboard Education

By consultant

Easy-to-Access Education on Demand with Chalkboard Education
Chalkboard Education is a comprehensive e-learning platform that collaborates with non-governmental organizations and higher education institutions to provide training and learning support to over 12,000 users in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda. Over 40% of their users engage with content on the platform on a monthly basis. The platform has three elements that make it an adaptable training solution to help fill skill gaps:

1. Organizations can manage content, track key cohorts and individual metrics, and export data easily for reporting.
2. The app can be used on almost any internet-enabled device with a screen.
3. It has staff who are experts in transforming existing face-to-face training materials into effective mobile training.

Chalkboard Education’s Impact

In Ghana, Chalkboard Education has supported the training of over 9,000 primary school teachers across the country by digitizing the curricula. Trainees who were previously required to travel to Kumasi for training can now pursue their learning from their teaching posts in rural areas. In Côte d’Ivoire, Chalkboard Education partnered with an NGO to provide an innovative way to train field workers on child labor prevention and safeguarding. Approximately 98% of the NGO staff has accessed the training.

COVID-19 Helped Shift Attitudes Toward Mobile-Based Training

“Before COVID-19, Chalkboard Education faced a tremendous mindset challenge because people could not understand the concept of learning on the phone. Now, people are more interested in exploring the app, especially older people”.Genevieve Simiyu, Chalkboard Education Ghana Country Manager

Chalkboard Education has received more interest in its offering since the outbreak of COVID-19. The pandemic opened up opportunities for grants and fundraising. Unfortunately, it also lost one education client because of school closures resulting in reduced cash flow.

Next Steps for Chalkboard Education

Chalkboard Education would like to become the go-to tool for teaching and learning. Demand for the app is high and they are looking for funding and expertise to support expansion, including instructional designers who can develop content suitable for various online audiences. The organization currently finds it challenging to recruit content developers with this expertise. It is also working to grow its software developer base by recruiting students straight from university.

How Chalkboard Education Can Support Platforms with Upskilling

As an off-the-shelf solution that does not require stable internet access or much phone space, the Chalkboard app is ideal for affordable data-enabled phones and geographically distributed trainees. Partners can import or create their training content with the support of Chalkboard Education’s instructional design experts. They can also track trainees’ activity and other engagement KPIs. Although Chalkboard Education does not have any platform clients at the moment, solutions such as this could be compelling options for providing training to platform workers and sellers.

Case study: Oze

Increasing Profits of Small Business Owners by Helping Them Build Habits Around Record-Keeping with On-Demand Advice and Tips

Oze brands itself as a business coach in your pocket. Designed to assist small businesses to digitize business transactions, Oze is a smartphone app with over 21,000 registered MSMEs users in Ghana (mostly in Accra) and over 1,000 users in Nigeria. Approximately 70% of Oze’s users are young men; one of the company’s goals is to increase the number of women users who tend to be more engaged. Around 77% of the app’s users are young people under 35 years old.

Insights into the Impact of COVID-19

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, Oze had 324 paid active users who input at least 40 data points into the app per month. While most of the paid users remained active during the pandemic, they showed significantly reduced revenues. Of users who had been using the app consistently before the pandemic, 66% had zero revenue by March 2020. Once Ghana’s lockdown restrictions were lifted, most users resumed using the app and were quickly back in business, although sales volumes had not reached pre-COVID levels by October 2020. At the end of 2019, 82% of Oze customers were profitable, up from 66% in the first quarter of 2020.

Training for Small Business Owners

Oze is sensitive to the fact that it is difficult to draw someone away from their business for training purposes, particularly if they are a sole proprietor. For this reason, Oze focused on perfecting in-workflow training through push notifications in the app. It enabled business owners to access content at their convenience, or while conducting a task related to the training topic so that it has increased relevance. Daily business tips, which are read by more than 70% of users, are pushed through the app to keep users engaged. Oze would like to know how soon after a customer gets a tip that they put it into practice.

Interpersonal training is provided to users through a business coach. Customers paid for this coaching before, but Oze recently started offering it for free as a reward for engagement. Users can collect “Oze coins” by engaging with the app and reading the push notifications, and coins can be exchanged for coaching sessions. The coaching service has proven to be very popular with users.

In-Person Training

Oze also conducts in-person monthly business training seminars, which have been digitized through Zoom and Facebook Live streams since the outbreak of COVID-19. These seminars focus on significant operational changes, business tips, and advice on COVID-19-related products.

Using the App to Track the Impact of a COVID-19 Relief Fund

More recently, Oze has piloted awarding $5,000 COVID-19 relief loans to eight companies. These loans were offered at below-market interest rates with a grace period of three months. Although Oze put a lot of effort into scaling up this program, they could not do so because of regulatory diligence fund issues. They had hoped to have over $100,000 in this fund by September 2020.

Partnering for User Growth

Oze recruits users in several ways. Approximately 30% of their users come from (1) active user referrals, (2) Facebook marketing, which costs about 52 cents per recruitment, and (3) institutional partnerships. Some companies even mandate that their clients use Oze. Oze has attempted to develop several private sector partnerships with e-commerce platforms and FMCGs.

How Upskilling at Oze Helps to Fill General Skills Gaps

Though Oze is an app to keep track of business transactions, they have a serious focus on training. The different touchpoints Oze has with customers through interpersonal training and in-workflow moments allow them to gather user insights, get feedback on features, update the app based on user needs, and constantly iterate on the training they offer based on user needs.

This constant feedback between the core business offering and training topics helps ensure that the training remains relevant and has maximum impact for users, and, in turn, for Oze itself. This is a unique advantage that platforms have over traditional training institutions, which are more removed from the realities of platform work and selling, and one reason why platforms are a useful conduit for upskilling. Greater links between partnerships and training institutions could help equip those leaving university with skills that better help them thrive in the world of work.

Case study: Soronko Academy

From Computer Skills to Soft Skills — How this Academy is Teaching Marketable and Transferable Skills to Help Women Find Fulfilling Work

Soronko Academy is a coding and human-centered design academy in Ghana that aims to develop digital natives by providing coding courses. Its goal is to pioneer the way for young people — especially women and girls — to be equipped with the technical and soft skills they need to realize their economic potential, engage in dignified and fulfilling jobs, and overcome the gender gaps in the technology sector. The organization also aims to cultivate the next generation of female innovators who will leverage their critical thinking skills and entrepreneurial spirit to create solutions that address their community’s most pressing problems.

Through public and private partnerships with ten external partners, over 10,000 women and girls have gone through Soronko Academy’s program. When it comes to digital training, the organization has been intentional about understanding the skills needed for the market and building products to bridge the skill gaps.

From Coding to Soft Skills Training

With the support of the Mastercard Foundation, Soronko Academy developed a Skills Assessment Tool and Online Learning Portal. It helps people assess their digital and workplace-readiness skills to help identify competencies and areas for continued growth, and become familiar with digital skills that are in demand. The platform provides people with training and helps them connect with jobs once they have completed courses, which include sponsored and paid classes, as well as free sessions. These courses cover the following areas:

• Basic computer skills, such as interfacing with a laptop, email, and Microsoft Word.
• Intermediate skills, such as Microsoft Excel and digital marketing (Soronko Academy has seen an increase in demand for digital marketing as a skill.)
• Advanced skills, such as CSS, PHP, Python, and Full Stack Web Development.

Although Soronko Academy started out with a focus on technical skills, it has recognized that its graduates would not be successful without basic communication and other soft skills. Thus, it added public speaking, negotiating, leadership, and other soft skills to its course offerings.

“We would connect beneficiaries with job opportunities but realized that there was no uptake. When we asked the graduates for their CVs and engaged with them, we realized that the soft skills of the graduates, especially during interviews and panel interviews, were lacking.” -Regina Honu, Soronko Academy CEO

Heightened Importance of Digital Skills Since COVID-19

“[COVID] impacted us positively, in the sense that we had to evolve our program, which enabled us to reach more people and increase our beneficiaries. COVID allowed people to see that digital is no longer a nice-to-have but an essential.” -Regina Honu, Soronko Academy CEO

​Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Soronko Academy has noticed an increase in interest for their programs. It received over 2,000 applications per program announcement in the months after the pandemic, compared with 190 applications pre-COVID-19. It seems that people have used the downtime at home as an opportunity to gain new skills.

With the increase in demand, Soronko Academy acquired more laptops to cater to more students. It had to observe safety precautions in providing courses during the pandemic, for example, by fumigating the work space, offering training on COVID-19 prevention to students, and contact tracing. The organization also put together micro-versions of some of the training for dissemination through WhatsApp, to address limitations associated with reduced movement during the lockdown.

Training Challenges

One of the challenges faced by Soronko Academy has been finding effective trainers. Initially, the organization engaged trainers with Computer Science degrees but found that these graduates struggled to teach basic computer skills. It is crucial for trainers to be able to give relevant examples, engage in action learning, and address students with different levels of knowledge.

Soronko Academy used to provide free online content but found that students were more likely to complete a course if they have a trainer to engage with and who can provide accountability. In addition, the courses have a system for reminders. Students can also earn certifications, issued at the end of the course, which turned out to be a critical motivator.

Another challenge has been around students’ access to data and laptops. For these students, Soronko Academy plans to continue to host face-to-face engagements.

How Soronko Academy Measures Success

To measure the success of its programs, Soronko Academy calls students three months after program completion and asks a set of questions, such as whether or not they have found a job or started a business. The organization also tries to measure the domino effect: Is there a positive impact on students’ communities after a student completes the program? Do students decide to invest in continued education? These things could indicate a wider impact of the program beyond the taught skills.

Aiming to Connect 10,000 Women with Work in 2021 by Focusing on Post-Training Engagement

Soronko Academy has set an ambitious target to connect 10,000 women and girls with dignified and fulfilling work in 2021. It will continue to run a blended model of online and offline classes to achieve this aim. The organization will also scale their program to six new regions in 2021 through partnerships with ecosystem hubs.

Soronko Academy has increased the number of programs available to train around 50 women daily. There has also been an increased focus on post-training opportunities, ensuring that students connect with jobs, internship opportunities, or opportunities to start or grow their tech-enabled businesses. To further empower the graduates, the organization is working on an online network that will have a jobs board; provide training on CV writing and interview skills; connect the women to funding opportunities, mentorship engagement, and career guidance; and provide mental health support. A Soronko Alumni Network will also be a part of this online network.

Providing Real-World Work Experience with Business Solution Center Run by Graduates

Soronko Academy has established a center that offers bespoke services to businesses in web design and development, social media management, branding, printing, and photocopying. Women trained at Soronko Academy run the center and trainees get a paid internship for three months.

The center allows the women to practice the technical skills they learned and further build important soft skills such as negotiating, pricing, meeting customer deadlines, innovating service provision, and providing customer service. After their internship, trainees will be ready to transition to full-time roles at other organizations or start their own tech-enabled businesses. The profits from the business solution center will be reinvested into Soronko Academy to train more women and girls.

How Soronko Academy Can Support Platforms with Upskilling

Although Soronko Academy is not actively partnered with any digital platforms, it is providing skills that help equip the next generation with digitally native consumers as well as entrepreneurs and developers who can create platforms of the future. Additionally, it may be a good fit for platforms to take advantage of the many programs that Soronko Academy is offering online and offline, to offer to people using their sites to generate sales or find work.

The role of third-party training organizations in platform-led upskilling is still evolving and may hold much promise; involving them may help make training much more efficient overall. It avoids the duplication of training content creation and delivery by each individual platform, and reduces the training burden for platforms to enable them to focus on delivering their core offering.

We, at the Mastercard Foundation Learning Partnership, are keen to see how this evolves. We will be actively supporting some projects introducing partnerships between third parties and platforms around training efforts, and we look forward to sharing the results.

Case study: eMobilis

eMobilis empowers young Kenyans with digital skills

eMobilis, a technology training institution and incubation hub in Kenya, is on a mission to create opportunities for African youth, preparing them for the future of work through marketable, industry-driven skills.

While originally set up to provide technology training for the telecom sector — as network engineers and mobile app developers, for example — eMobilis has diversified over the years to include digital skills training.

This move was made possible through industry partnerships, most notably with Google through Google Digital Skills for Africa and recently with Ajira Digital, an initiative of Kenya’s ICT, Innovation, and Youth Affairs ministry, with funding from the Mastercard Foundation.

Both partnerships are trying to solve some of the biggest challenges in Kenya — youth unemployment and low digital literacy— by arming young people and small businesses with the skills they need to take advantage of the benefits of the digital economy, in particular, the freelancing industry.

In a conversation with Caribou Digital, eMobilis’s Digital Skills Program Manager Edna Karijo shared that the partnerships have been valuable in providing free training to young Kenyan job seekers, especially those who cannot afford to pay for comparable classes, or live outside cities and urban areas.

“Our goal at eMobilis is to ensure that talented youth are trained to meet the growing opportunities and needs of the ICT industry and are able to create livelihoods from digital and digitally-enabled work,” Karijo said.

The Google Partnership

In 2016, eMobilis was selected as a Partner for Google’s initiative launched the same year — the Google Digital Skills for Africa Program — which aims to empower millions of young Africans with digital skills.

eMobilis’s role is to deliver the digital marketing training component of the Google program to young job seekers and small- and medium-sized businesses in Kenya. The Google Digital Skills Program also has an online portal with a wider range of free learning content to help grow small businesses and jumpstart careers.

The online content comprises 26 modules, including building and marketing one’s online presence, creating an online business strategy, marketing on social media, content marketing, search engine optimization, and more. Those who complete the 40-hour online course get a Certificate in Digital Marketing from Google.

“To date, eMobilis has trained over 300,000 Kenyans on Google Digital Skills through face to face sessions conducted by our 30+ digital trainers based in different communities across the country. Of the training participants, 46 percent are female and 54 percent are male,” Karijo said.

Karijo said the program has been beneficial not only to job seekers but also to entrepreneurs who are either transitioning to set up digital agencies or want to upskill themselves by learning digital marketing.

To reach more people, eMobilis collaborates with youth organizations who mobilize participants from all corners of the country. In addition, eMobilis also works in conjunction with national government programs such as the National Youth Service, Uwezo Fund, and the Presidential Digital Talent Programme. Universities and Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutes (TVETs) across the country are also part of the partnership, providing the much-needed infrastructure for the program such as the computer labs where trainers and trainees have access to computers and an internet connection to access the course content.

​Before COVID-19, the eMobilis training included a half-day, face-to-face session before the participants completed the rest of the course online. Due to the pandemic, all classes have since moved online and are now being conducted via the Google Digital Skills Portal and YouTube. However, this model presented challenges as many youth didn’t have access to computers or a reliable Internet connection after the institutions that provided these closed in March because of COVID. This led to the reduction in the number of young people taking the classes.

To keep those who could get online motivated, trainers kept in touch with the trainees through WhatsApp groups, helping them complete the online portal certification.

The Ajira Partnership

The Partnership between eMobilis, Ajira Digital, and the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) aims to prepare 1 million Kenyan youth to earn a decent wage from digital and digitally-enabled jobs in the freelancing economy through training and demand linkages.

Launched in 2016, the Ajira Digital Program seeks to position Kenya as a choice labor destination for multinational companies as well as encourage local companies and the public sector to create digital work.

eMobilis is the principal government partner tasked with operationalizing 106 existing Ajira Youth Empowerment Centers, as well as institutionalizing Ajira Digital clubs and curriculum at selected higher-level learning institutions (universities and TVETS).

The Ajira training curriculum covers five job categories including data entry, content writing and translation, transcription, digital marketing, and virtual assistance.

“We take them through opening online work accounts on platforms like Upwork, QA World, Fiverr, Lynk, Range, and Jumia. We are packaging them to succeed as gig workers. We also take them through soft skills, entrepreneurship, and bidding, all of which are work readiness skills,” Karijo shared.

​However, because of COVID-19, the centers had to be closed in March and all classes shifted online- on Zoom. Some of the centers, Karijo says, were reopened later in October and trainees are able to take the Zoom classes there.

The first Ajira virtual training was piloted in June 2000 with 4,000 trainees, mostly aged 18-25 and also interns at the Public Service Commission. The training was facilitated by 51 Ajira trainers from across the country. Karijo says that some working Kenyans have also taken an interest in the Ajira program because they want to take their skills online.

After the training, the participants go through a one-month virtual mentorship journey during which they hone their new skills through practical tasks. This mentorship, done in groups, is conducted via Google Classroom and WhatsApp groups.

“If you are trained on transcription, we give you practical work, assignments, and tasks for you to do before you become confident to go online on your own and offer the services. We hope they will be able to get decent work after the mentorship,” Karijo explained.

​Recently, Eliud Gachugu, the head of the Ajira program, revealed that in the last three months, about 18,000 young Kenyans have accessed digital jobs through 19 local and international partners.

“The trend is set to increase going forward as we aim to get one million Kenyans to access online freelance jobs,” Gachugu told Capital FM.

Barriers

Karijo said that a lack of foundational computer skills is a barrier for many, especially those who come from rural areas or from schools where computer classes aren’t offered. Other barriers include a lack of personal devices and a stable internet connection.

Some center managers, Karijo shared, have taken the personal initiative during their free time to provide basic computer skills. Most of the time, however, anyone who comes without the foundational skills is referred to a computer college or TVET where they can get them.

Karijo expressed hopes that the Kenyan government’s ongoing efforts with the digital literacy program in primary and secondary schools will, in time, provide the digital foundation that many need to be at a level where they can ably benefit from both the Google Digital Skills for Africa and Ajira Digital programs.

“Amidst COVID-19, digital skills initiatives have become even more relevant, with the benefits increasingly becoming evident. Without a doubt [they] have great potential in engaging young people in meaningful digital work,” Karijo said.

Case study: Fundis

FUNDIS invests in digital and soft skills to help workers become independent and digitally savvy professionals

FUNDIS—a word that means “fixer” in Swahili—is a mobile-based platform in Kenya. FUNDIS taps into the extant skills in the informal sector and connects carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and many other “fixers” to customers.

We talked to the co-founder and team leader at FUNDIS, Alex Kamanga, about their dream of enhancing the human capacity of the informal sector in Kenya through platform led upskilling.

“Even if we train the workers and they end up going to other platforms, it is not a loss to us.”

Founded in 2018, FUNDIS currently has a database of about 1100 registered workers, but Kamanga says that because they can’t guarantee work for everyone at the moment, the company has selected 50 fixers to work with initially; this was an intentional choice meant to keep things more manageable while the platform is in its early stages. Currently, the 50 technicians provide about 13 services, such as appliance repair, plumbing, and construction, and FUNDIS plans to add three more services in the near future. Since its founding, FUNDIS fixers have completed approximately 1000 jobs.

Many of the fixers already have the technical skills required to, for example, repair a fridge, make a wooden table, fix tiles, or paint a house, but Kamanga says the majority lack both basic digital skills and the soft skills that are key to keeping customers happy.

Only about 10% of the fixers have attended a vocational school, and many dropped out of school along the way. Kamanga says the low literacy levels and a lack of exposure to digital tools while working within the informal sector, means that many fixers are unaware of the opportunities that come with owning a smartphone and being connected to the internet. A fundi (fixer) often chooses a feature phone, which stays powered longer than a smartphone, instead he says.

Accordingly, the 50 fixers who were selected from the hundreds who signed up on the platform have been trained not only on how the platform works but also on basic digital literacy and soft skills. Kamanga says the training is important because it improves the quality of the fixers’ work, brings in more jobs, and could help bridge the gap between informal and formal work.

As part of their upskilling program, FUNDIS has developed a fixers guide on which the bulk of the training is based. The guide is updated frequently in response to feedback from both fixers and customers.

The soft skills training that Kamanga says makes up the bulk of their upskilling program focuses on professionalism and ethics and covers several areas including language, etiquette, presentation and tips on how to ask questions, pay attention to details, take notes, and so on.

FUNDIS’s digital literacy training involves teaching the fixers about the basic features of a smartphone, the importance of owning one, and social media training. The platform wants fixers to be able to, for example, document their work by taking photos and sharing them on social media.

“When they understand the importance of owning a smartphone, affording it is not an issue. Those who do not have smartphones have not gotten to really seeing the need and we think our main work is drilling a ‘gig work mindset’,” Kamanga adds.

By offering all this training, Kamanga says that FUNDIS’s end game is to create independent, digitally savvy, professional fixers with the ability to market themselves individually and even find more jobs outside the platform.

Kamanga adds that the company does not have the technical or financial capacity to provide vocational skills, but they do offer what he calls “semi-technical” training: FUNDIS’s in-house lead fixers help fixers on the platform brush up on skills as they take on new jobs. They also provide remote on-boarding training and technical assistance when less experienced fixers need help finishing a job.

Because of COVID-19, Kamanga says the company is devising new ways to help customers remotely, and also conduct online training for fixers. The company is toying with the idea of running Zoom training sessions by partnering with internet cafes in fixers’ neighborhoods.

​Through the Zoom calls fixers on the platform would engage with the lead fixers, ask questions, and even work with design teams when jobs involve making something for a customer.

FUNDIS wants to position itself as the trainer for fixers in Kenya—for both soft skills and digital skills—whether they are on the platform or not. The company is interested in partnerships with training institutions, including appliance companies that can provide technical training. Kamanga also says they are considering a system whereby FUNDIS pays for worker training from an external institution and then deducts the costs from their earnings.

“We don’t mind if the workers end up on five other platforms. Our success depends on the success of the worker. The business is pegged on these professionals and not the customers.”

​Finally, Kamanga says that FUNDIS wants fixers to see the value of cultivating digital skills and using smartphones to perform various functions related to their work. In future, FUNDIS wants to help the fixers acquire phones and is reaching out to low-end smartphone makers like infinix, Itel, and Huawei to secure good deals.

“Dependable smartphones, reliable data, and power banks is the starter kit we want each technician to have,” he says.

Case study: Jobberman

Jobberman invests in virtual softs skills training amid COVID-19 to help prepare job seekers for the workplace

Jobberman was founded in Nigeria in 2009 and has grown to become the largest recruitment platform in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2017, Jobberman became part of Ringier One Africa Media Group (ROAM), one of Africa’s largest digital publishers. The group has over 13 businesses across Africa including Jobberman Ghana and the Brighter Monday Job platforms in East Africa. In Nigeria alone, the platform has over 2.5 million registered job seekers actively looking for jobs posted by more than 65,000 employers. When we spoke to Hilda Kabushenga Kragha, CEO at Jobberman Nigeria, in May 2020, she reported that 8,000 new placements had been made across the platform in the last month.

While Jobberman continues to connect job seekers to new work—even in the midst of COVID-19—many lack the skills, specifically soft skills, to succeed in the workplace. In an attempt to improve job seekers’ “employability” and ensure young people are better prepared for the workplace, the platform has begun to invest in soft skills training through its Youth Engagement and Learning arm.

With support from the Mastercard Foundation, the platform launched a free, six-week virtual soft skills training program for 18-35 year olds in early May. Over 15,000 people, 57 percent of whom were women, signed up for the first training course covering a range of topics from effective communication to time management and business etiquette. On signing up, the participants took a pre-assessment test developed by India-based Interview Mocha, a global skills assessment platform which had already partnered with Jobberman on their integrated skills assessment product, available for companies as an affordable assessment tool during the recruitment process.

Jobberman’s youth engagement team, supported by a team of 20 volunteers, delivers the training via Zoom in keeping with COVID-19 social distancing rules. The volunteers and facilitators continue to engage the participants on various Telegram channels, outside the Zoom class. Each Telegram group is hosted by members of Jobberman’s Youth engagement team who answer trainees’ questions and test the participants’ knowledge through mini exercises. The Telegram groups are also used to share job opportunities.

​Additionally, through the partnership with Interview Mocha, candidates will take a final assessment at the end of their course to gauge the evolution of their soft skills competencies.

Jobberman Soft Skills Training topics

1. Managing Self and Personal Development

• Personal Effectiveness and Time Management
• Business Etiquette and Workplace Ethics
• Effective Communication, Presentation, and Storytelling

2. Working in Highly Successful Teams

• Emotional Intelligence
• Teamwork
• Flexibility and Adaptability

3. Employability Skills Workshop

• Professional CV/Cover Letter Writing
• Job Search Strategies
• Interview Preparation
• Introduction to Negotiation Skills

4. Creativity and Idea Generation

• Creativity & Innovation
• Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

“I am beginning now to answer the question of who am I? I have become more aware of myself. I know my strengths and I am aware of my weaknesses.” —Ebenezer Adama, participant and volunteer

“I have had some change in thinking. I see the deficiencies I had in dealing with other people and I will work towards solving them because of this training. It has really been an eye-opener.” —Osaratin Daniel, participant and volunteer

To take this training further, Jobberman is looking to partner with universities and other higher education institutions to validate and certify the soft skills curriculum so that participants can cite it as a credential while searching for jobs on or off the platform. Research has shown that people proficient in soft skills are more successful in the workplace. Given the competitive nature of the job market at present, this qualification will give candidates a leg up in their job search.

More training to fill skills gaps

While the Zoom-based, soft skills training program has been a success, Kragha says Jobberman is looking to invest in a more sustainable Learning Management System in partnership with other training organizations to help fill a range of skills gaps.

Through further training, Jobberman is keen to help increase women’s participation in the job market, provide financial literacy training to help youth—in the gig economy especially—manage their money, and offer a digital ecommerce module to help improve digital literacy skills and knowledge on how to leverage digital and social commerce to scale small businesses.

“When it comes to ensuring that job seekers are rightly skilled and have all the tools they need, the gaps are so many that no one company can do it all. While at Jobberman we have decided that soft skills and placements will be our primary focus, through partnerships we can work with technical training providers to bring online learning opportunities closer to our platform users.” —Hilda Kabushenga Kragha, CEO at Jobberman Nigeria

At the moment, Jobberman hosts a few courses in partnership with various training agencies in which job seekers can enroll for a fee to improve their skills. However, Jobberman sees the training as, in part, its corporate social responsibility and wants to ensure that there are affordable courses for the thousands of Nigerian job seekers.

In our Platform-Led Upskilling project, we’re exploring how digital platforms are teaching a range of transferable skills to users and, in doing so, becoming an important part of the education landscape and helping to create human capital that can be allocated in many different contexts within an economy. We’re excited to see how such training opportunities evolve on Jobberman and other digital platforms!

Case Study: Copia

About Copia

Copia uses locally-based agents—trained by a network of ‘business advisors’— as both ordering points and delivery points in order to get goods to last-mile clients in rural and peri-urban areas of Kenya. A ‘mobile commerce platform’, Copia serves the middle- to low-income African consumers that formal e-commerce typically doesn’t reach.​

Copia agents are usually business people operating small retail outlets, such as hair salons, tailor shops, and kiosk stores in the communities in which they work. Copia’s model caters to agents with feature phones allowing ordering through SMS and calls, as well as—for those with smart phones—an app. An agent earns a commission on every order placed through Copia, whether the agent’s own business sells the products or not.

The business advisors

Copia employs about 150 business advisors who train the 7000 agents spread across the country. The business advisors help the agents increase their sales and commissions. For the 7000 agents, Copia is an opportunity to earn additional income. Many are low-income earners and are not digitally savvy.

The agents

Age: Between 30 and 45

Gender: 70% are female

Technology: 30% have smartphones (the rest have feature phones)

How Copia trains its 12,000 agents

Copia trains its agents in a number of different ways. Firstly, every agent receives face-to-face training during onboarding. This in-person training is later complemented through phone-based training and support. Finally, business advisors offer on-the-job training, business advice, and basic financial literacy training when they visit their agents in the field.

To learn more about how Copia trains and upskills its agents, we spoke to Nikki Germany, Copia’s Chief Growth Officer.

Interpersonal training is key

Once recruited, each agent is taken through the basics of how Copia works and how they can sell their products through Copia—either via the USSD channel or, for agents with smartphones, the app. This face-to-face training is then supplemented by telephone conversations and the training offered during field visits by business advisors.

Financial literacy and planning

The Copia business advisors also offer financial advice to the agents, especially on the extra commission they earn for selling products through Copia. On average, Copia says their agents report a 37% increase in income after signing up. This commission is paid to the agents in a monthly lump sum (as opposed to the smaller daily payments they’re used to).

As their income increases, the agents realize the need to plan better for this extra cash—whether to spend it on school fees or rent or invest in the growth of their businesses. The Copia business advisors assist agents in making these new decisions.

“For example, our agents will use their commission to pay rent, school fees, livestock or buy more inventory for their business or expand their existing business. Our business advisors talk with them about their goals, what they want to do with their commission and how much they need to make to reach their goals.”

Business advisors also dispense advice about how agents can increase their commissions:

“Our business advisors talk to the agents a lot about the commission and how they can increase their commission, and we know that when the commission is going up, that’s a good thing for them and that means our revenue is going up. And how much they sell is dependent on how many customers they get into the business. So we also really focus a lot on making sure they bring customers into the business.”

Digital training

For the 30% of agents with smartphones, Copia offers training in how to use the app, and those who sell more get tablets. Tablets enable agents to show customers photos and videos of the available products and get instant pricing information from Copia.

“We provide tablets to our very best agents and then train them on using the app. We also try to get them on WhatsApp and Facebook. I am sure that some of them then use that for other things.”

Copia is looking at ways of helping more of its agents access affordable smartphones to enable more digital skills training.

Training partnerships

Copia is interested in partnerships that can help their Agents become more effective and savvy business people. Copia understands that when their agents can run their businesses more effectively not only will the agent earn a larger commission, but Copia as a business will also benefit.

Looking to the future

With more resources, Copia wants to add other training methods such as group training meetings between agents, innovative training via SMS, gaming and even quizzes.

“We’ve always been interested in doing those kinds of things but never had the resources to put into it.”

Copia is already experimenting with using deliveries as another training avenue and plans to expand this training method in the near future. Business advisors aboard delivery trucks could be a further physical touchpoint for training.

The transformational aspect

We see training in generalizable skills—such as financial planning, digital literacy, and vocation-specific activities—as potentially transformational because they result in portable skills. In other words, the type of training Copia offers imparts skills that agents can use, both on and off the platform, for the rest of their lives.

We’re particularly interested in how platforms like Copia are increasingly involved in the overall education landscape in the markets in which they operate, the opportunities and challenges this presents, and the implications this has for livelihoods in a digital Africa.

“A lot of the training that we do (for the agents) is around how to get more customers—how to upsell and cross-sell to those customers. That training has a generic benefit. We haven’t measured this but we assume that the fact that they are taught about how to do this, they would then be able to use that in their existing businesses.” —Nikki Germany

Case study: Lynk

Imagine: It’s Monday morning, you’re rushing to work and discover a leak in your bathroom. Your heart sinks. You quickly send WhatsApp messages to your friends and post on all the local Facebook groups: “Anyone know a good, reliable & affordable plumber near Muthaiga?” You wade through the water and responses, trying to figure out how to differentiate one recommendation from another. You call a few plumbers whose phones are off, and eventually arrange to meet two, one doesn’t show up and one is late. You hope she knows her stuff and can fix your leak because it’s now Wednesday and your patience with the mop and bucket is wearing thin.

​For many this is an all too familiar scenario. Connecting with trusted and well-trained tradespeople in countries with no directories or platforms where customers can find and review them is challenging to say the least. Moreover, many of the four out of five working Kenyans who rely on informal work for their income, struggle to prove their trustworthiness and qualifications to customers and end up relying almost exclusively on word-of-mouth referrals.

​Lynk aims to change this: Its online marketplace allows Kenyan tradespeople and artisans—Lynk calls them Pros—to promote their services, receive job requests from clients, and build reputations through customer reviews. For a company whose tagline is “Get instant access to reliable and affordable services,” being able to assure customers of the quality of their Pros’ work is key. Although Pros are not employees, they are the face of Lynk—they even have branded uniforms and kit bags—so the customer’s opinion of the Pro and Lynk go hand-in-hand. Accordingly, Lynk’s success depends on on-point customer service.

​Lynk quickly realized that ensuring high quality craftspersonship and customer service was a challenge because so many of its Pros had been trained at discredited institutions or vocational colleges teaching outdated techniques. So too, few had received customer service training. “We started out with a relatively low-touch auction-based platform model, but soon realized that we would need to get more involved in service delivery in order to gain happy customers and build the reputation for quality that we’re aiming for,” said Akinyi Ooko-Ombaka, Lynk’s Segment Manager & Education Focal Point, whose role was created specifically to address what has become a critical component of Lynk’s model: training. Lynk’s Pro training addresses skills gaps that would otherwise hold both the platform and Pro’s back.

Lynk provides training on a range of topics

We have categorized these topics as vocation-specific, digital literacy, and soft skills. Here are a few examples.

Vocation-Specific Tutorials

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Because skills were lacking in some verticals, Lynk realized they could increase worker incomes and customer satisfaction by providing technical training. The company has tried to develop relationships with local technical and vocational education and training institutions (TVETs) and continues to explore this option, but owing to a number of challenges, they decided to bring Pro skilling in house. They train workers in domains ranging from painting and beauty, as part of onboarding.

​For areas with deeper technical requirements, they are testing a further step with FundiWorks, their apprenticeship program. FundiWorks currently focuses on carpentry and provides end-to-end training in a fully operational production workshop where Pros can apprentice with master carpenters to improve their techniques, raw materials procurement and storage practices, and furniture design, to ensure high-quality finished products. Once carpenters have completed this apprenticeship they are better equipped to sell high-quality services both on the Lynk site and elsewhere.

Digital Literacy Training

​
Lynk has developed a Pro app to help workers create and maintain a profile and receive jobs. However, the team noticed that Pros were not receiving job notifications and thus missing opportunities because they were turning off their mobile data when not actively searching for something in order to conserve their data and battery. Interestingly, Lynk found that a lot of Pros’ internet packages were going unused because their expiry dates were reached before all the data had been consumed, findings consistent with our own research. Lynk decided to address this lack of knowledge about managing data consumption and determining which apps are draining data and battery in their onboarding training.

​

Soft Skills

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Lynk also understands that soft skills are critical. It provides this training during onboarding, but Lynk has also experimented with reinforcing soft skills through small reference cards. These cards, provided to each Pro, map out the steps for delivering a service to a customer complete with explanations about the importance of punctuality and sample scripts for different scenarios, for example, what to say if they were late or how to deal with an unsatisfied customer.

Training is provided through a variety of approaches

The team at Lynk is actively testing out new modes for providing training.

Interpersonal Training

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Like most of the platforms we spoke to, Lynk places great importance on face-to-face training. All Pros receive in-person onboarding training at Lynk’s office as well as refresher training. And carpenters can take part in the FundiWorks program.

Online Training

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Lynk Lounge is an area of the Pro app that contains videos and text-based training modules on various topics including how to create an appealing profile, provide good customer service as well as vertical-specific tips.

In-Workflow Training Moments

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These are in-workflow nudges that upskill users while they are using the main functionality of the platform. For instance, Lynk sends reminder messages via SMS —like: “your appt is in one hour,” “time to leave soon,” “these are the items you will need to deliver this service,” and “call the client to let them know you are on your way”—to reinforce the importance of good customer care.

Training that’s transformational

Through these upskilling activities, Lynk is beginning to fulfill some of the roles traditionally played by vocational schools, with the added benefit of an immediate and refined feedback loop between customers and training content. What makes these upskilling efforts particularly impactful is that they transfer skills that are generalizable and portable. The worker can utilize the skills learned both on the platform and in other areas of their lives, potentially transforming their livelihoods and narrowing the skills gap in the overall economy.

Case study: Jumia

One of the influencing factors behind our platform-led upskilling project came out of our 2018 research into how micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya use platforms in their daily business. In the course of our research we heard about many self-employed Kenyans learning new skills via the very platforms they rely on for their livelihoods. For instance, Robert, a Jumia merchant, told us how Jumia actively trained him on how to become a successful vendor.

​Even though Robert isn’t an employee of Jumia, the relationship he has with the platform is more intertwined than simply anonymous sales. We met with Jumia to learn more about how it trains vendors, what it trains vendors in, and the challenges it has faced along the way.

From the moment I knew about Jumia, I went to their offices, I was trained on how to use the website, and through that training I am able to make sales . . . and track orders.”
-Robert, Jumia Merchant

The Power of Offline vs. Online Training

While a range of online training modules are available for Jumia Kenya vendors, the platform has found high-touch channels to be the most effective for upskilling. They encourage vendors to attend classroom onboarding sessions, as opposed to online alternatives, by offering incentives for attendance such as discounts on the Jumia store. While offline training lays the foundation, online material can be used as refresher training, or to access complex training on the more nuanced applications of the Jumia vendor portal. Vendors benefit from these multiple touchpoints but—we were told—struggle to take advantage of the online options without first going through the initial face-to-face training.

Using AI to Make Training More Personalized and Scalable

Jumia is constantly striving to make its training more scalable and personalized. One way it does this is by using AI to anticipate, identify, and personalize training interventions. Unlike attending a face-to-face onboarding session, or navigating online training materials, this approach to upskilling happens in the moment, when users might not even realize they are receiving training. See below for two examples:

Content Score

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The “Content Score” in the Seller Center automatically measures the quality of a product’s content listing and, in doing so, provides advice on how to improve a listing.

Sellers Coach

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The Sellers Coach guides vendors on how to improve their online businesses through subtle hints designed to help them accelerate sales and increase the quality of goods on offer. The tool, customized to vendors’ individual businesses and integrated into the Seller Center portal, provides actionable recommendations on topics ranging from pricing to stock control.

Challenges with Training

Jumia invests heavily in training because they have to

Platforms depend on high volumes of transactions, which necessitate a large user base of sellers equipped with the skills to fulfill sales. If the skills are not present, the business will fail, and so the onus is increasingly on the platform to step in and deliver them.

“Training is a necessary investment and key to platform growth. Sellers who are successful have gone through training.”

—Sam Chappatte, CEO of Jumia Kenya

But providing vendors with enough quality training, especially face-to-face training, is a challenge for Jumia. While training is key to providing “sustainable income for merchants” and in turn increasing Jumia’s sales, the costs it incurs—especially the in-classroom training expenses of renting training facilities and training trainers—is a burden. In a bid to increase the reach of their in-person training, Jumia has recently moved its vendor training facility to a larger unit in Nairobi’s Central Business District enabling them to run five trainings per day rather than one. They would like to be able to expand their classroom training outside of Nairobi to enable vendors in second tier cities to sell across the platform as well, but resource constraints are currently preventing this expansion.

Many new vendors lack a basic understanding of e-commerce

Through classroom training, online videos, and in-workflow training moments, Jumia is constantly at work upskilling and re-skilling its vendors with an offering that includes a mix of skills—from digital sales and marketing to digital and financial literacy.

A big part of their training focuses on building an understanding of what selling on Jumia means, that is, in essence, how online business differs from the offline world. We attended one of their face-to-face vendor onboarding sessions in Nairobi where the first question the trainer put to the class was “What is e-commerce, and how does it differ from your offline business?” There appeared to be a very basic understanding of what this new digital work opportunity entailed.

”A big part of the training is demystifying what e-commerce is. There are lots of assumptions that it is easy to transition an offline business into the online world. Training is aimed at clarification and building understanding.” —Valentine Wambui, Jumia Kenya’s Head of Vendor Relationship Management

A lack of understanding of digital sales and marketing is evidently a challenge for the training team.

​“Despite high mobile phone and internet penetration, there is a serious lack of awareness of e-commerce. Education is still an issue.” —Pauline Masese, Jumia Kenya’s Head of PR

How Upskilling at Jumia Helps to Fill General Skills Gaps

While Jumia trains merchants in “platform proficiency”—enabling them to access and use the platform itself—the additional, generalizable skills they transfer to users are of particular interest to us in this research project. Training in these generalizable skills, from financial and digital literacies to vocation-specific activities, are what we call transformational upskilling.

​Transformational upskilling results in the transfer of skills that are portable and useful both on and off the platform and that therefore not only benefit platforms and their users but also increase the overall level of human capital in a workforce. We’re particularly interested in how platforms, such as Jumia, are increasingly involved in the overall education landscape in the markets in which they operate, the opportunities and challenges this presents, and the implications this has for livelihoods in a digital Africa.

Case study: Uber

Platforms, like Uber, increasingly recognize the value of building providers’ skills. Accordingly, Uber now offers On the Money financial literacy training sessions—in-person educational seminars run by Old Mutual for Uber driver-partners. The sessions, held at Uber’s Greenlight Hubs (dedicated driver-partner support centers), aim to equip Uber driver-partners with critical money management skills, entrepreneurial skills, information on how to best manage their finances, and the habit of proactive saving and developing healthy savings habits. Sessions were launched in 2016 in South Africa, and, following the success of the program there, expanded to Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya in 2017 before relaunching across South Africa in 2019.

Uber driver-partners receive invitations in-app and via email about each monthly session and can apply to attend. The partnership between Uber and Old Mutual was formed primarily to benefit driver-partners who need the necessary skills to ensure they are successful as small business owners.

“The financial wellbeing of driver-partners is a key priority for Uber. We are constantly working hard to ensure we are investing in driver-partners and assisting them in building sustainable businesses. With our ongoing partnership with Old Mutual, we are making it accessible for our driver-partners to have all the necessary skills to assist them to manage their money and further increase their chances of running a successful business.”
—Ndunduzo Nyanda, Country Manager for Uber South Africa

Platform-Led Upskilling within Uber’s Ecosystem

Case study: Gokada

Lagos, a city known for its traffic jams and congestion, is quickly becoming an active market for bike-hailing startups as they battle it out to meet customer demand. While regular okadas (motorcycle taxis) are not new to the city, they are famous for their reckless driving and poor safety standards. In response, a new influx of platforms focused on delivering a safer and more seamless motorcycle-taxi experience have begun to attract both customers and investors.

Gokada, one of the leading on-demand motorcycle hailing platforms in Lagos, raised $5.3 million in a Series A round in May 2019, having onboarded over 1,000 drivers and completed more than one million rides. As with its competitors, security and safety are top priorities for Gokada’s two-wheeled taxi business. In order to maintain their standards for safety and security, and to compete with increasing competition, the company invests heavily in training their drivers.

​The value the company places on training was reiterated in their recent ten day shutdown of operations. One of the goals of the shutdown was to spend time retraining drivers.

“We’re closing shop to retrain our drivers on customer service, hygiene, driving, and navigation use,” wrote the CEO, Fahim Saleh, in mid-August 2019.

​Before the shutdown we spoke to Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO of Gokada, about how Gokada approaches training within the organization:

​“Training is a differentiating factor, we are happy to make the upfront investment. We understand that within the marketplace, drivers are really critical and whoever is going to win in the market will have over-invested in the drivers, so we are more than happy to make this type of investment.” —Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO of Gokada

How Gokada Trains its Drivers

At Gokada, training and upskilling is provided through two primary approaches—face-to-face training (what we call “Interpersonal” in the table) and in-app messages and notifications (what we call “In-Workflow Training Moments”). These “Upskilling Moments” are designed to reinforce lessons learned during in-person training, encourage drivers to meet their KPIs, and ensure that they continue to exhibit behaviors that represent the Gokada brand favorably.

​See the snapshot of some of the content Gokada delivers through these two training approaches.

Heavy Investment in Face-to-Face Onboarding Training, with Help from Partners

Gokada recently partnered with a company based in Indonesia, the largest defensive driving academy in the world, to help them deliver world-class, face-to-face driver training at scale. This defensive driving academy provides ongoing support through ‘training of trainers’ (ToT) and on-the-ground observation of training. As a result of the partnership Gokada has been able to reduce the length of in-classroom and in-the-field training from seven days to three and, in turn, work towards its ambitious growth targets.

​Gokada has also recently partnered with Wave Academies to develop and deliver ad-hoc refresher training focused on customer service.

“Today we have 1,000 drivers and are looking by the end of year to have 5,000 and in 24 months to have 50,000 trained drivers.”
—Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO Gokada

Training Covers an Array of Topics

During the three-day onboarding training drivers develop a range of skills across four major modules: soft skills, defensive driving, using the Gokada app, and using Google maps. The training is designed to ensure that Gokada drivers deliver a “safe and customer friendly bike-hailing experience.” Training is reinforced through ad-hoc refresher training sessions and the in-app “training moments.”

1. Soft Skills

For platforms—such as Gokada—that rely on producers to meet customers in person and hence represent the face of the brand, soft skills are essential. At Gokada soft skills training focuses on communication and behavior, with plans to expand this to include grooming and etiquette best practices. The impact of soft skills training has been noted through a reduction in customer complaints and an increase in referrals.

​“Soft skills training is focused on what makes a good customer experience and what are the requirements from a behavior standpoint.” —Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO at Gokada

2. Defensive Driving

Developed in partnership with the defensive driving academy, defensive driving training focuses heavily on traffic rules and safe driving practices. This is followed by an on-the-road practical training in which drivers have the opportunity to put training techniques into practice. An end-of-training assessment is then conducted to assess drivers’ skill development before they can become official Gokada Pilots.

3. Gokada App Training

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This module focuses on what we call “platform proficiency”, that is, training that helps explain how to use the platform itself—in this case, the Gokada app. From information on how to register an account to ride request procedures and guides on how to check earnings, the training provides a 360°overview of the various applications of the driver app.

Transferable and Transformational Training

Every platform does some “platform proficiency” training to explain how to use the platform itself—how to open an account, link a bank account, navigate the app, etc. Gokada does this through their app training, and we don’t want to discount how important it is, but what we are really interested in is how platforms transfer general, transferable skills to their users. What we call transformational upskilling.

​Gokada, through its soft skills and defensive driving training, is giving drivers portable skills that they could potentially take elsewhere. In doing so, not only does the Gokada platform, and its drivers, benefit through increased rides and revenue, but Gokada’s investment in training is contributing to the economy as a whole and “is the very definition of creating human capital—capital which can be deployed/invested/allocated in many different contexts within an economy.”

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Helping Upskill and Upscale Drivers off the Platform

Success and return on investment in face-to-face training, specifically the defensive driving module, is measured through safety metrics:

​“It (defensive driving training) has had a positive impact in terms of safety, with a reduction in incident rates and accident rates compared to the same reporting period last year.” —Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO at Gokada

​But training at Gokada doesn’t just focus on enforcing its value proposition of security and safety. In tandem with investing in training to help reach its business objectives, Gokada is equally dedicated to investing in the long-term future of its drivers. Accordingly, in addition to its formal training initiatives, Gokada plans to offer drivers loans to help them further their education. This is an example of the broader scope of how Gokada supports its drivers’ upskilling needs.

​“Gokada believes that drivers need a career trajectory towards transitioning out of being a driver to doing other things.” —Ayodeji Adewunmi, ex-CEO at Gokada

Case study: Digifarm

Innovations in Platform-Led Upskilling: DigiFarm trains its farmers through SMS with the support of a face-to-face advisory network

DigiFarm, a digital platform for Kenyan farmers run by Safaricom, provides smallholder farmers with access to products and services that help them source, transact, learn, and increase their outputs.

​As of May 2019, DigiFarm had 1,038,000 farmers registered on its platform accessing high quality inputs, digital input credit, harvest cash loans, and educational content.

How DigiFarm Trains Its Farmers

To date almost 310,000 farmers have accessed DigiFarm’s learning content, provided via integrated SMS learning services bundled into the core product offering.

The SMS services are delivered by partners including Arifu (with more than 2 million interactions on the service) and iShamba by Mediae. The SMS training is supported by an offline “Village Network Advisory Group” managed by the Kenya Livestock Producers Association (KPLA).

See the snapshot of some of the educational content delivered to DigiFarm farmers through these online and offline channels

We spoke to Craig Heintzman, CEO of Arifu, as well as Emmanuel Makau, Technology Product Manager at MercyCorps AgriFin Accelerate—which has supported Safaricom with the development of the DigiFarm platform for the past three years—about how the platform trains and upskills its users.

Arifu’s Interactive SMS Training

Content Development

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Arifu’s interactive SMS learning service enables farmers to access a range of content from agronomy and farming techniques to financial education relating to DigiFarm’s loan and credit services as well as product training on the various applications available across the DigiFarm platform.

​“Technical skills for farmers to improve their yields is consistently the big draw.” —Craig Heintzman, CEO of Arifu

​To develop the various content modules Arifu either works with partners to digitize existing materials, licenses already existing digital content, or develops content from scratch. Owing to their significant experience in financial literacy training, Arifu developed the content for DigiFarm’s financial education modules in house. All of these content creation strategies involve a sophisticated, human-centered design process to ensure content is relevant and appropriately designed for farmers.

Measuring Impact

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Through various approaches Arifu measures the usage and impact of their training modules. Usage is measured by an analysis of what content is getting the most traffic and at what point in the user journey people drop off. On average, Arifu has seen farmers pulling over 25 messages, which enables them to complete 2 trainings. Knowledge retention is assessed through responses to quizzes, questions, and surveys, and Arifu measures customer satisfaction through a ratings system. Arifu is also in the process of bringing the Arifu Skills Score to market, which uses proprietary algorithms to measure users’ proficiency in and comprehension of concepts. Additionally, they are currently running an impact evaluation on their financial literacy and agronomy training with the World Bank and Harvard Business School to measure outcomes relating to capacity development, behavior change, yield and income increase as well as the application of chatbot-based learning data for use in alternative data credit scoring.

Offline, Face-to-Face Support via the Advisory Network

A year after launch, in 2018, DigiFarm rolled out the “DigiFarm Village Advisory Network” (DVA), a network of over 1,500 field experts designed to support farmers’ digital journeys. The physical support network was introduced based on feedback from farmers who wanted to be able to share their questions and queries in person.

​While the DVAs are on hand to provide support and advice relating to the financial products available through the platform, as well as to answer any general digital literacy questions, their training focuses on technical agricultural practices. The DVAs work with farmers throughout the journey of a crop cycle, from planting to sales, providing advice and training to fill gaps in knowledge and understanding.

Tech and Touch to help fill learning needs

​DigiFarm farmers use a mix of physical touch points (DVAs) and online SMS training to help fulfil their various upskilling needs. Despite the notable costs involved in managing a face-to-face support network, the hybrid model of online (SMS) and offline training has been a success in terms of driving uptake and usage of the platform and improving agricultural practices. A key benefit of interactive SMS for online delivery is that it works without internet or data bundles and is widely usable among farmers with even very low levels of digital literacy.

Transformational Training through DigiFarm

While DigiFarm trains users on “platform proficiency”, giving farmers the necessary skills to access and use the platform itself, the bulk of training focuses on vocational agricultural skills and financial literacies. The latter two content categories result in portable skills that farmers can use off the platform, that is, transformational upskilling. By that we mean training that helps address skills gaps by teaching skills that users can utilize outside the platform itself.

​With DigiFarm the portability of skills is evident in the certification provided to farmers who complete Arifu’s SMS learning modules. Once farmers have completed a content module they receive a branded, online certificate that they can then download and print. A number of DigiFarm “Power Users” have taken these certificates to potential employers, demonstrating the off-platform utility of these skills.

“There is huge demand for farmers to acquire certificates, for pride in what they are learning and the challenges they are working hard to overcome but also to support them to find new sources of livelihoods.”
—Craig Heintzman, CEO of Arifu

Case study: FlipKart

Case Study Overview

Leading Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart strives to upskill sellers in a personalized and highly contextualized way, irrespective of where sellers are in their business growth and digital literacy journeys. To this end, Flipkart is investing heavily in video and vernacular to respond to new seller segments. They also invest in insights and analytics, which complement on-call business support, and in conjunction enable Flipkart to deliver personalized and contextualized in-workflow training moments at scale. Some of Flipkart’s upskilling is transformational: that is, the organization is upskilling across a wide array of content from vocational specific tutorials like how to package particular types of products for shipping to financial literacy content that helps sellers understand the new goods and services tax (GST) and instruction in soft skills like good customer service. For Flipkart, the upskilling business case is all about seller success—the more successful sellers are on the platform, the more successful Flipkart will be as an e-commerce platform.

Flipkart’s Insight

“India is a country with huge diversity—everybody has their own journey and they are at a different place, language is different, tech adoption is different, motivation is different. Our biggest challenge is how to understand and deliver value in a very customized fashion. [Flipkart] should be able to use technology to assess everything that is important for the seller. . . using our understanding of motivation across such a diverse ecosystem of sellers—and marrying it with business goals and delivering the needs for each of those cohorts— is a challenge. . . and doing that in a very scalable way. . . You have to think differently.”

— Nishant Gupta, Head of Flipkart Marketplace & Seller Ecosystem

Innovations in upskilling: Flipkart’s investment in seller success

According to The Economist, India will see more people come online than any other country in the next 15 years and is already becoming the fastest growing e-commerce market in the world. At the same time, India is not necessarily a single market. The continent country is not only the second most populous in the world, but it has incredible cultural and linguistic diversity. Nishant Gupta, Flipkart’s Head of Marketplace & Seller Ecosystem, likens it to Europe: “Imagine 28 states, all speaking different languages, all different literacy rates, all lapping up technology at different rates. We are seeing an evolution of e-commerce on top of these demographics.”

Personalizing Upskilling

Flipkart strives to upskill sellers in a personalized and highly contextualized way, irrespective of where sellers are in their business growth and digital literacy journeys. Training initiatives continue to evolve and respond to segments that are coming online to platforms.

1. Upskilling needs to be relevant and in-context while also being delivered via an appropriate channel for a given seller’s business and digital journey.
2. Video is an increasingly important upskilling mode within the online training approach.
3. Even when sellers efficiently transact in English, developing or improving a skill is best done in the vernacular. This has implications for online training content that is textual or video-based, as well as webinars and other interpersonal training.
4. On-call upskilling (e.g., voice telephone calls) has been a successful way of providing interpersonal training that incubates businesses coming online to Flipkart’s platform.
5. Investments in insights and analytics are helping to personalize and contextualize upskilling, for instance, in-workflow training moments can be delivered digitally and complemented with a person-to-person call as a follow-up.
6. Flipkart outsources to experts where others can deliver additional value to the seller ecosystem—so far, this has been a particularly effective way to deliver financial literacy content.
7. Some of Flipkart’s upskilling is “transformational”—the organization is training across a wide array of content types from vocational specific tutorials like how to package particular types of products for shipping to financial literacy like understanding the goods and service tax (GST) and soft skills like customer service best practices.
8. The business case for upskilling is linked to seller success—the more successful sellers are on the platform, the more successful Flipkart will be as an e-commerce platform..

At the heart of India’s e-commerce revolution is a series of success stories—from Mohit Vashisht, a sports and fitness entrepreneur from Jalandhar to Pramod Kumar, a healthcare appliance seller from Chikmagaluru to Ritu Kaushik, a handbag seller from Sonipat, a small town in Haryana. Each of these stories speaks to how Flipkart is upskilling sellers, but they also speak to the sometimes transformational nature of that upskilling; that is, upskilling that builds skills that are transferable to dignified work.

This case study summarizes how Flipkart is thinking about upskilling, particularly how its investments in different training approaches and content types play a role in seller success. The case study is based on interviews with Flipkart conducted in July 2019.

Relevant and in-context content delivered through appropriate channels

Since becoming a marketplace and opening up to sellers in 2013, Flipkart has invested significant resources into learning and development solutions to address the needs of its sellers—irrespective of where each seller is in his or her individual journey—both as a small business owner and in their personal development of digital and technology skills.

​”The success of upskilling has to exist from the need for it. The seller community needs to feel the need to be upskilled. . . It is very important to get the motivation why somebody has to learn a skill and marry [content] with that purpose. . . [To that end,] we do very in-context learning and development for the seller community.

—Nishant Gupta

​To ensure training is appropriate, Flipkart segments its sellers across two dimensions: (1) technology savviness and (2) seller lifestage (e.g., I’m a new seller and don’t know how to run my shop online or I’m already online but want to know how to use the tools on the platform to run my business more effectively). Sellers are further sub-categorized depending on the product categories they sell and how they sell them (i.e., as manufacturer/retailer, importer, or small retailer).

​Segmenting sellers helps Flipkart guide relevant learning content to the most appealing approaches for different sellers at different stages because the company has realized that not every approach is effective and efficient for every type of seller. The biggest distinction comes with scale. Whereas small sellers are not yet invested enough to take time away from their businesses to travel to in-person training events, they do engage through webinars and by viewing other online training content, such as videos. By contrast, larger sellers already familiar with the platform do not attend the webinars, which cover more basic topics like “Sell & Grow”, “Growth Q&A with a Leader”, and “Advertising in both English and Hindi languages”. Rather, larger sellers are looking for personalized attention, and, as such, they do attend in-person seller events to engage with Flipkart representatives more holistically.

1.Content examples include how to upload a tax registration document; how to upload KYC bank account details

2.Flipkart’s Seller Apex Program aims to reduce costs for sellers by optimizing warehouse processes. The program targets sellers with their own warehouses that have reached a certain scale.

3.Flipkart’s Smart Fulfillment program is another initiative focused on optimizing warehouse processes for scaled-up sellers. Flipkart visits the seller’s location and learns the seller’s current warehouse layout and processes. Flipkart then trains sellers and their employees on managing warehouse operations using best practices, including upgrading their technology to effectively make the seller warehouse a “Smart Flipkart Warehouse”.

Uptake of video as an upskilling mode

Video has become a powerful tool for Flipkart to provide formal training digitally to sellers at scale. People across all consumer segments in India are increasingly viewing video content as faster speeds of Internet and cheaper data become more prevalent. This is making video not only effective but also cost-efficient.

Flipkart’s SellOnFlipkart YouTube Channel has over 31,000 subscribers and hosts a variety of different content formats:

Seller Quick Tips and Tricks and Business Guidelines, for example, are “learn how” tutorials, like this video on packaging that has received 720,000 views.

Seller Success Stories tell stories about how a seller evolved over time and how Flipkart enabled them to do so. This seller success video, for example, received over one million views after only one week on YouTube. And this video has received over 600,000 views after three months.

Master Key videos, such as this one, combine advice from Flipkart senior team members, explanations of concepts, new platform features, and seller success stories into brief multi-segment videos.

Flipkart’s online training videos cover key upskilling training content categories. Many are platform- or technology-oriented, such as this video explaining how to use the “My Orders” dashboard, or this video explaining how to process an order. But other videos explain seller professional practices, such as this video that explains fulfillment generally before explaining Flipkart’s fulfillment offerings for sellers. Similarly, there is video instruction on how to package products by different product categories (e.g., health and beauty, mobile & accessories, automotive); how to upload professional images for clothing products, or on the regulatory requirements with which sellers have to comply. Flipkart has also added financial literacy content, like this video on India’s goods and services tax (GST) and content that covers soft skills like this video that explains how to answer buyer questions.

Importance of upskilling in local vernacular

Given its success as a training tool, Flipkart is investing heavily in video, particularly vernacular content. This is because Flipkart has learned that, even when sellers can transact in English, when developing or improving a skill, learning happens more easily in a seller’s first language/mother tongue. Many of the over 150 videos on Flipkart’s YouTube channel are in English or subtitled in English; but Flipkart also has 50 videos in Hindi, 11 in Tamil. Nishant commented that “as e-commerce is progressing, people who are well-versed enough in English to figure things out by trial-and-error are already online. Now the next wave of growth in the seller community is coming from people for whom English is not the first language and who find it difficult to learn new concepts in English.”

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Success of phone calls and integration with other approaches

Telephone calls have been successful as a way to onboard and incubate businesses coming online to Flipkart’s platform. They have a 60-day business incubation support program that is primarily on-call and trains sellers on how to manage their e-commerce businesses on Flipkart end-to-end. The topics discussed vary widely and include:

• • Generating demand
  • Good examples of catalog entries
  • Using images
  • Achieving product visibility on the Flipkart platform
  • Competing with sellers to get selection on the the platform
  • Identifying unique opportunity areas within a seller’s catalog and competing more effectively
  • Packing particular kinds of products
  • Shipping the product on time
  • Understanding the monetary transaction of orders as well as returns
  • Reading profit and loss statements

“We have people call sellers every two to three days on their phones at a suitable time. We discuss how to grow their business. We also call when the first few orders come in so they feel comfortable processing those first orders. We also share links to our seller learning portal.” —Nishant Gupta

Calls are also a useful bridge to other approaches, such as online training delivered explicitly through videos or text on the site, or as follow-ups to a particular event or an opportunity discovered by Flipkart’s insights engines. For example, when a seller receives his or her first order, Flipkart shares a link to online content about how to process the first order. Likewise when the seller receives their first payout, they also receive an email containing content on reconciling the statement. Flipkart monitors who is checking emails and infer who is trying to figure out what. Depending on whether a seller has taken action after receiving an email with training content, this monitoring can trigger Flipkart to call sellers in case they have questions.

Insights and analytics help to personalize upskilling

Flipkart has two insights engines that they use to customize recommendations for sellers: selection and pricing.

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• • • Selection: Flipkart collects customer data on product searches. The selection insights engine flags when the customer is not finding enough quantity or variety and shares this information with sellers in particular categories and recommends they expand their selection or quantities. The Flipkart team also follows up with sellers to help troubleshoot challenges the seller faces capitalizing on these opportunities. For example, sometimes the sellers need to understand the business case or needs access to a photo studio to list the product.

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• • • Pricing: Flipkart provides insights to the seller based on historical product performance both on Flipkart and other online marketplaces. Significantly, this analysis includes not only the seller’s own data, but also how multiple competitors’ prices may have affected conversion of the seller’s product. This helps the seller understand optimal pricing for conversions and competitiveness.

Working with partners has been an effective way to deliver financial literacy training

Flipkart outsources to experts to deliver additional value to the seller ecosystem. For example, very recently Flipkart formed a partnership with ClearTax, a chartered accountant FinTech firm. Now all of Flipkart’s sellers’ queries related to financial transactions —whether specific to Flipkart or on e-commerce in general—can be addressed through this platform (e.g., registering the business, getting a tax registration number to do business online, registering a trademark, filing tax returns, and other compliance reporting services). ClearTax provides financial services to platform sellers at discounted rates. Moreover, ClearTax gives sellers access to a GST Health Check report, an all-in-one tool that generates actionable GST insights into their business and allows sellers to check return filing status, compare returns, and understand compliance status. Nishant noted that this had been a particularly effective mode of delivering financial literacy content: “We recognized that we may not be able to solve each use-case ourselves, so we partnered with a company that specializes in this and can deliver lots of value to our sellers.“

Some of Flipkart’s Upskilling is Transformational

Flipkart provides platform proficiency content, but they also engage with training across a wide array of content types, from vocational specific tutorials like how to package particular types of products for shipping to the customer and financial literacy like understanding GST to soft skills like how to answer a buyer’s questions or customer service best practices.

​”We are a platform that does believe sellers as well as customers are the key to our success. All of our programs and initiatives center around building a flywheel where both participate as successfully as possible. This is especially true for business incubation but also for any of our initiatives.” —Nishant Gupta

​Providing general and portable skills is second nature for Flipkart. In fact, they have a whole “Ecosystems” program designed to identify areas outside of platform proficiency where the seller ecosystem needs support and where, as a platform, they can help meet some very specific needs. Accordingly, financial literacy and brand building have been ongoing areas of focus.

​In July 2017, India changed from a VAT (value-added tax) to a GST (goods and services tax) regime. According to Nishant, “this was a huge change for the entire country and everybody’s life got touched if they were filing taxes.” During the transition, Flipkart launched a campaign and initiative called Flipkart GST Genie: an eight to ten month program that thoroughly explained how GST works to those affected, from the fundamental concept to how it impacts any kind of a business, how it impacts e-commerce businesses, and how it impacts seller businesses on Flipkart. By participating in the training, Flipkart’s sellers learned how the transition affected invoicing, taxation, and every other area of their businesses so that they knew how to work with the new scheme and consequently faced fewer challenges in adapting to the GST. Nishant told us, “We are very proud at the end of the transition that there was a third-party study in which sellers voted Flipkart as number one platform that assisted them during that transition.”

​With their brand building ecosystem support, Flipkart works with sellers that aspire to make a brand out of a private label—all the way from logo creation, tagline, packaging design, and Facebook advertising to officially establishing the brand, such as by filing trademarks.

The business case for upskilling is linked to seller success

From a business model perspective, Flipkart is an e-commerce marketplace. As such, their success hinges on sellers as much as it does on customers. Indeed, Flipkart’s Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), that is, revenues generated from sales of product on the platform, comes from the sellers. In economies like India where there is significant demand to purchase goods online, sellers need to be a focal point. To this end, Flipkart uses “seller satisfaction scores” as a key metric within their business. Seller satisfaction scores are generated whenever there is an interaction between Flipkart and a seller.

​Flipkart also tracks metrics specific to each upskilling initiative. For example, Flipkart tracks the following KPIs in its 60-day business incubation program: how many sellers listed how many products; how many sellers were able to dispatch a product on time; how many sellers are transacting on the platform; and how many are getting above a certain threshold of business. These metrics work alongside seller satisfaction scores to help Flipkart translate from upskilling initiative targets to achieving operational goals.

Conclusions

Flipkart’s upskilling journey isn’t without challenges. Nishant is very aware of the complexity involved in delivering customized insights that take into account each seller’s multifaceted journey as a business person and an individual while also recognizing the fact that sellers are spread out geographically across the country.

“India is a country with huge diversity—everybody has their own journey and they are at a different place, language is different, tech adoption is different, motivation is different. Our biggest challenge is how to understand and deliver value in a very customized fashion. [Flipkart] should be able to use technology to assess everything that is important for the seller; the seller can also give us those insights themselves explicitly, but using our understanding of motivation across such a diverse ecosystem of sellers—and marrying it with business goals and delivering the needs for each of those cohorts— is a challenge…and doing that in a very scalable way…You have to think differently.” —Nishant Gupta

For Nishant and Flipkart, using technology to deliver customized, insightful training at scale is their biggest challenge and the problem they aim to solve. Rural, non-english speaking sellers are going to be the key to scaling up, and efficiently reaching them will take further innovation beyond call centers and “feet on the street.”

The learning from this case study, as well as Flipkart’s ongoing development as an organization, may be particularly useful for platform players and their partners in African economies as e-commerce grows and expands. For instance, it is clear that upskilling beyond platform proficiencies will be critical for platforms playing in this space to reach and train sellers effectively. Other platforms can learn a lot from how Flipkart’s training initiatives have evolved as well as where it is investing in technology that allows them to scale their initiatives, reaching hundreds of thousands of sellers from across a variety of rural geographies and incredibly diverse backgrounds.

Case study: Sky.Garden

Training at Sky.Garden: co-created, scalable, and replicable

Launched in May 2017 into the burgeoning Kenyan e-commerce market, Sky.Garden’s differentiator is the bottom-up design of its platform: It was built in consultation with the informal merchants who would become its e-commerce sellers. “We spoke to over 2,500 merchants before we even wrote a single line of code,” Daniel Maison, Co-Founder and CEO told us. Understanding these merchants’ informal offline behaviors, literacy levels, and pain points, allowed Sky.Garden to build a platform that “fits like a puzzle piece into their lives.” For example, it has taken advantage of caching, enabling their more than 3,000 sellers to access the vendor portal and upload product information and images outside of internet connectivity.

And Sky.Garden’s approach to designing training modules for its merchants has been no different. The in-app and online training content was co-created with merchants, to ensure that the right language was used and the design was intuitive for end users.

“We asked merchants, ‘Does this button placement make sense?’ ‘What should the language say?’ and ‘Where should we put the payments page?’ to ensure we set up a solution built by its intended audience,” shared Daniel.

A Focus on Online Training
Through an online, website-accessed merchant education portal, sellers have access to training videos and online training content. Tutorials and what we call upskilling moments—online training that happens in the moment when users might not even realize they are receiving training—also play key roles. For example, the platform provides nudges and tips that advise merchants on how to take good product photos and remind them to input details such as color and sizes. Bite-sized training material is also available through the merchant app to which Sky.Garden will soon be adding video content thanks to a partnership with MercyCorps Youth Impact Labs.

While Sky.Garden offers monthly in-house training to merchants—and understands the benefit of hands-on, interpersonal interactions—it simply isn’t scalable for the young platform’s small 25-person team. As a result they have focused on leveraging their core product, the platform itself, to deliver training. They also believe that an online training set up will be more easy to replicate when they expand to other markets.

Help Building Out Transferable Training Content
While Sky.Garden’s training content focuses on how merchants can make the most out of the e-commerce platform, they would like to expose them to more transferable skills that can be replicated and used on other online platforms. For example, Daniel cited training on money management, financial literacy, and digital marketing (such as how to run Facebook campaigns), all as areas of training in which Sky.Garden is keen to invest. While Sky.Garden has run successful Facebook campaigns in house, to build brand awareness and help with sales conversion, it is working towards delivering simplified social media marketing skills that will be driven by online merchants themselves. Content creation is also an area where they would like to build capacity.

“We would like to focus on developing more content that can further equip merchants” shared Daniel. “Being able to build out and modularize the training content would help us enable sellers to be better at their jobs.”

Case study: Facebook

Facebook: helping fill digital skills gaps in Africa

While Facebook’s original purpose was that of a social network, connecting people digitally with their friends and families, it has increasingly become an important network for businesses, enabling large corporations as well as micro-entrepreneurs to promote their products and services to the burgeoning Facebook community.

Our previous conversations with small business owners in Kenya revealed the integral role Facebook and WhatsApp play in their day-to-day business. To help ease this transition into the digital world, and to enable all sizes of businesses to grow through the platform, Facebook has been investing in digital skills development across Africa.

We spoke to Sherry Dzinoreva, Head of Policy Programs for Africa, about the various initiatives her team runs to help fill digital skills gaps in Africa. She revealed the motivation behind her work:

“We know that Facebook is a platform that can be used as a force for good, whether helping small businesses to grow or bringing communities together. Our digital skills programs are designed to have an impact on how individuals use our platform for both business and personal growth.”

Dzinoreva’s team runs a number of programs aimed at supporting small business owners to use digital platforms to grow their businesses. While inevitably there is a focus on the use of Facebook’s platforms in business, conversations also include general advice on how to make the most out of “the power of digital platforms.”

While this isn’t a typical platform-led upskilling story—given that the entrepreneurs Facebook is training are technically customers rather than self-employed platform workers—Facebook’s contribution, in terms of teaching portable skills to entrepreneurs that help fill skills gaps in a workforce, resonates well with our transformational upskilling story.

Below we outline some of the training initiatives Facebook runs, highlighting the role Facebook plays in the broader training and upskilling landscape in various African markets.

Boost with Facebook

Boost with Facebook (previously “Boost your Business”) was launched in Africa two years ago and is currently in operation in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and five francophone African countries (Cameroon, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin and DRC). With over 50 trainers across the continent, the initiative has already trained more than 50,000 entrepreneurs through its 3-5 hour, free-of-charge, digital marketing workshops.

During the workshops local trainers guide entrepreneurs through the use of digital platforms to market their brands and businesses. The curriculum includes both non-specific Facebook content—from general digital branding and marketing advice, to digital literacy skills on how to use free apps to create online content—and Facebook-specific content—such as how to create a community in a Facebook group and how to use Messenger as a customer service tool. Training on general digital marketing skills is what we define as transformational upskilling, because these skills are portable and thus useful both on and off Facebook’s platform.

Similar to what we uncovered in our other platform-led upskilling conversations, the Boost with Facebook initiative in Africa has found that offline, face-to-face training provides a very different experience to online learning, delivered through their Facebook Blueprint training material. In fact, they’ve seen significant benefits in using offline workshops as a first point of engagement with entrepreneurs. Not only is engagement higher through offline channels, but Facebook also worries that the cost of data and access to connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa may make it challenging for people to access online content.

In addition to Boost with Facebook, Dzinoreva’s team also runs #SheMeansBusiness in Nigeria and South Africa, a similar program focused on transferring digital skills to female entrepreneurs.

Additionally, the African Policy team also trialed Facebook for Creators in Nigeria last year, and launched DigifyPro programs in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya giving young people the opportunity to attend a ten-week intensive digital skills bootcamp and job placement program to prepare them for a future career in digital marketing. Over the last year DigifyPro, run in partnership with DigifyAfrica, has run three cohorts and placed around 60 people in digital marketing agency jobs in South Africa and Nigeria.

Impacting lives of Facebook users and the broader economy

While Facebook’s digital marketing training helps drive traffic to Facebook’s platforms, Dzinoreva’s team isn’t focused on sales so much as on closing digital skills gaps and the impact this has on the lives of Facebook users in Africa and the broader economy.

“I strongly believe if people use a platform well for their business, this will have a rippling effect on their business and ultimately the local economy. These trainings are a way to support the countries where we operate, and contribute to the economies in which we serve,” shared Dzinoreva.

Dzinoreva’s team works hard to develop learning materials and identify and work with local partners and facilitators who can make the learning experience an impactful one for every program participant. And, for that reason, Facebook is clearly playing a role worth watching in platform-led upskilling across the continent.