Features

Any company establishing a presence across Africa has many challenges to overcome. Those problems multiply exponentially when you happen to be a consumer electronics provider like Samsung.

The Korean firm has been expanding its geographic reach aggressively and is no stranger to the debilitating effects of the lack of strong technical and technology skills in its new African operations.

“Being an electronics provider with an established business in Africa, we realise it’s a promising continent, but there’s also a great need for skills development. We acknowledge those realities as our point of departure, as we do business in Africa,” says Kea’s Modimoeng, Public Affairs and Common Shared Values manager for Samsung Africa. “We established the Samsung Electronics Engineering Academy in 2011, to ensure that we have job-ready graduates. Unfortunately, the reality is that even BSc. electronics graduates still need to be retrained for the workplace.