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SAP East Africa covers operations for the enterprise

application software company in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda,

Rwanda and Ethiopia. We spoke to managing director Andrew Waititu about their

recent recruitment and training initiatives and possible

opportunities for the future.

for the next generation


Training schemes designed to benefit the wider population are increasingly an important part of

how companies operate in Africa. With enormous development projects such as Kenya Vision 2030 promising the creation of millions of new jobs, gaps in education and training will have to be filled. Companies like SAP are taking it upon themselves to fill them with generous schemes designed to

give graduates valuable skills for the job market. They’re also working at the grassroots level – for example during upcoming Africa Code Week, in which excitement will be created for young students around coding and creating things via IT platforms, helping recruitment possibilities in the long term.

These schemes are not just designed to help SAP. SAP Skills for Africa, a skills development and job creation program conceived

“We’ve got more and more graduates out of university with very, very good skills

unable to get jobs, and this is one of the reasons we came up with the SAP Skills for

Africa program

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quite literally on the back of a napkin by Andrew Waititu and a colleague from Kenya’s ICT Board, isn’t there to drive the cream of Africa’s graduates towards careers with the company. Instead it’s part of a wider solution to the reported 54% mismatch between the skills of jobseekers and the requirements of potential employers.

SAP Skills for Africa started in Kenya with just six students on its pilot scheme, four of whom went on to work for SAP, with the others quickly finding employment. Waititu describes what the residential scheme involves: “We’d train up these guys, give them full certification and see we if can link them up with our partners or existing customers, so that they get hands on experience for a three month internship, which in turn would give that partner first choice to either employ that person, or release them back into the ecosystem, now with some experience”. The programme has now become a successful initiative across the continent in key locations in which SAP does business.

Kenya’s graduatesWaititu describes the graduate employment market in Kenya as “tough, very tough”, and schemes like this are designed to alleviate the problem. A suggestion of the scale of the issue comes from the fact that the first SAP Skills for Africa



program, despite specifying stringent requirements such as a first class honours degree and a rigorous interview process, attracted three thousand applicants.

Waititu goes on to discuss the root cause: “Kenyans have grown up knowing that if you study hard you’ll get a job, so what has happened is that we’ve got more and more graduates out of university with very, very good skills unable to get jobs, and this is one of the reasons we came up with the SAP Skills for Africa program”.

Employment problems faced by graduates seems to be an issue felt around the world, as more and more people go to university without necessarily gaining ways to stand out to employers. This problem is being widely discussed in the UK and the United States and seems to be a problem faced by graduates and employers both in developed and developing countries.

The issue affects SAP directly, but importantly it also affects the companies they have to work with. Waititu say that “there’s always that issue where you want a consultant, but you want x number of years of experience, and that’s the importance of having these internships”. Closing the skills deficit across the board will help all employers and collectively forward Africa’s development.

Supplementing educationSAP have also formed a relationship with Nairobi’s Strathmore University in another initiative to help close Africa’s graduate skills gap. Combining SAP Skills for Africa with another of SAP’s programmes, SAP Africa University Alliances, the project is designed to supplement a normal university education and help graduates find employment soon after completing their studies. Waititu explains: “What we do is provide students at the end of a six

“What we do is provide students at the end of a six month period, as part of their normal course of education, with SAP certification



month period, as part of their normal course of education, with SAP certifi cation”.

The diff erent market settings across Africa eff ects recruitment diff erently across the continent and of course brings other issues too. Thinking about East Africa in terms of being almost a subcontinent in itself, Waititu says that “once you leave the borders of Kenya you fi nd the maturity of the market and the needs of customers are slightly diff erent. So, initially you’d fi nd that you’d be going into some markets and having to explain from scratch who SAP is and what they do. However, over the years we’ve got it to the point where customers no longer question what ERP (enterprise resource planning) is and how it will help them”.

However it’s also true that changes around the continent will bring opportunities for the company. Oil and gas discoveries in countries such as Tanzania and Mozambique promise the possibility of growth. Waititu explains that what SAP are looking forward to “is the downstream impact of those oil fi nds. If you look at Tanzania, which is already seeing the benefi t of the gas they have, there will be downstream retail and marketing companies that will come about and those are the ones we look at as opportunities”.

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SAP Africa (Pty) Ltd. - Kenya Cavendish Building, 4th Floor 14 Riverside Park Riverside Drive Nairobi, Kenya

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