The SAP Social Sabbatical team, drawn from 12 countries, which for the last one month put their expertise in Kenyan firms while gaining insight that will go towards improvement of SAP solutions globally
Four Kenyan companies were the beneficiaries of a four-week SAP social sabbatical that saw them engage SAP experts in human resources, finance, IT and best practices in to business processes and solutions.
Juhudi Kilimo, African Management Initiative, Open Capital and Synergy were selected based on their social impact and focus on strengthening entrepreneurship in Kenya. The challenges faced by the organisations were matched with available SAP team skills.
Speaking during the press conference, Andrew Waititu, managing director (MD) of SAP East Africa, said the Social Sabbatical programme not only provides an effective avenue for SAP to give back to the communities in which it operates but provides SAP with meaningful insight and feedback.
“SAP East Africa is proud to bring the SAP Social Sabbatical programme to Kenya, having watched it make progress in various other regions, including India, Brazil, South Africa and China. The programme provides our employees time to share their skill-sets and gain an important understanding of challenges experienced by different businesses from all corners of the world. It is also through initiatives like this that SAP is able to develop technology solutions that are tailored to emerging markets such as East African,” he said.
African Management Initiative supplements learning institutions in the training of business leaders in response to the growing middle class population and hopes to train one million African managers by 2023.
Open Capital Advisors provides financial consulting services to high impact small and medium sized enterprises, while Juhudi Kilimo enables farmers to come together and guarantee easy access to loans on their technology platform. Juhudi Kilimo currently provides loans to 30,000 farmers and is targeting 100,000 in the next year.
Sanergy has been providing toilets to informal settlements through a franchise arrangement.
“SAP has helped us think of how we can better keep track not just of customers, but everyone we meet with,” said Rodney Carew, senior analyst at Open Capital Advisors.
