The Safaricom’s Chief Executive Officer, Bob Collymore on Thursday urged the private sector to partner with the civil society, non-profit making organisations and development partners to solve challenges facing Kenyans and Africa at large.
Collymore said there was a huge gap because the jobs created by the private sector were less compared to the available manpower making young people to migrate to foreign lands to seek for employment opportunities.
He said lack of job opportunities had forced young Kenyans into modern slavery as they go to foreign lands to look for job opportunities and end up in servitude.
Collymore affirmed that Safaricom has entered into cooperation with Africa Shared Value summit in order to help transform people’s lives by finding business opportunities that may help address social needs with a view of elevating people’s lives.
The Safaricom CEO hinted at a partnership with Vodacom to enhance the M-pesa operation not only in Kenya but Africa at large also.
“The cooperation Africa Shared Value is meant to uphold societal values rather than striving for profits.” Bob Collymore emphasized.
On public outcry that M-pesa network was down, Collymore said “Safaricom was putting a lot of investment in developing and maintaining the network infrastructure so as to prevent network outage.”
Collymore in a media brief held in Nairobi further noted that the contract with Safaricom is set to expire in August 2020 not as earlier communicated in the media.
The FSG Social Impact co-founder and Managing Director, Mark Kramer states, “there are countless opportunities for small medium entrepreneurs to come up with products and services that may help solve social needs by use of technology as doing this would help in creating more job opportunities.”
By Peter Ochol/Alice Gworo
