In a bid to help entrepreneurs start and scale up businesses besides imparting digital skills to job seekers, social networking giant Facebook said it would train some 500k people in India on digital skills by 2020.
It unveiled two programmes on Wednesday — Facebook digital training and Facebook startup training hubs. “India is poised to have a digital economy worth $1 trillion by 2022. We believe the best way to prepare India for this digital economy is by providing tools, knowledge, and skills people need to succeed,” said Ritesh Mehta, Facebook’s head of programmes, India and South Asia.
According to Mehta, these tools will help people learn digital skills and enable entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses in digitising their business. Apart from these two, Facebook also runs offline training programmes as well as Blueprint (free online training for advertising on Facebook).
“Through all these initiatives, we hope to train more than half-a-million people in India by 2020,” he said adding that more than 51,700 SMBs have been trained by Facebook in India, including 12,000 women entrepreneurs, through Boost and SheMeansBusiness. Facebook is working with organisations like Digital Vidya, EDII, DharmaLife and StartupIndia to develop the curriculum that is designed to work in low network strength regions as well.
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