Visa Partners With Trace Academia to Help African Youths Develop Practical Business Skills
The latest development in Visa’s Practical Business Skills (PBS) initiative, which offers potential partners integration and co-branded opportunities to contribute to business transformation and empowerment, is their partnership with Trace Academia, a mobile-based learning application that aims to enable 26 million youth across Africa.
The collaboration provides a free online learning platform with a variety of educational courses. The program, which is available on Android and iOS, is user-friendly and inclusive, offering bilingual learning in a variety of fields.
Providing opportunities for small and micro businesses to succeed
The new relationship is a natural extension of Visa’s mission to provide entrepreneurs with the resources they need to succeed, and it will combine entertainment with education to create a fun learning experience.
On the Trace Academia platform, Visa’s Practical Business Abilities has been redesigned as an interactive course encompassing various skills such as business planning, marketing, and procuring capital.
Aida Diarra, Senior Vice President and Head of Visa in Sub-Saharan Africa, said, “Our cooperation with Trace Academia allows us to extend our effect in making business skills more available to youth, who are one of the primary drivers of entrepreneurship on the region.”
Practical Business Skills helps Visa’s clients and partners, such as Trace Academia, with their job and economic development activities.
PBS offers digital educational resources and tools to help small and micro enterprises flourish through challenging obstacles, with small and micro firms accounting for more than 90% of worldwide businesses and providing 50% to 60% of global employment. “We provide knowledge on what it takes to establish a business, financing and cashflows, business management, marketing, and ultimately, how to push firms into a thriving operation by leveraging Visa’s considerable expertise in financial education.” “We believe that every step of a business is vital, from development to maturity,” adds Diarra. “As a result, we provide entrepreneurs with materials that enable them to confidently make informed business decisions at every point of the business lifecycle.”
Developing communities through empowering them
Visa is working with customers and partners to create co-branded Practical Business Skills sites to increase awareness and access to the business skills education resources available to small businesses. Within the context of payment solutions, it has become a crucial enabler for stakeholders such as governments and fintechs to accelerate and grow their social impact and business strategies with SMBs.
“More than just corporate development, Visa’s PBS promotes inclusive, long-term progress for everyone.” “We believe that by using our platform, we can enhance livelihoods and have a beneficial impact on communities,” Diarra says.
This promise is part of Visa’s global commitment to digitally enable 50 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world in order to help local communities get back to business and propel SMBs to greater resiliency and growth.
“Practical Business Skills builds on the success of Practical Money Skills, our flagship financial education effort, which has been used by over 40 million people around the world. It contains content that is appropriate for a wide range of SMBs in any region and is accessible through a series of 50 videos on a variety of critical issues, including managing, organizing, digitizing, protecting, and developing a business.
Creating a network of alliances to achieve success
Visa has collaborated with other major partners to adapt Practical Business Skills to stakeholder demands and execute co-branding strategies, in addition to Trace Academia.
Some of its diverse partners include an African mobile network operator delivering financial education to SMBs using mobile money, a leading Singapore Fintech integrating PBS into its SMB-facing blog and YouTube channel, and a cross-border trade association assisting corporations in connecting with SMBs.
Visa Inc. and the Visa Foundation have also aided SMBs in their recovery from COVID-related issues. Their Small Business Hub, which shares the same values as the Practical Business Skills, provides turnkey solutions for firms to develop.
