2022 Sustainable Business Report

75 PARTNERING FOR GROWTH: TRANSFORMING LIVES | KPI SUMMARY OUR MATERIAL TOPICS OUR BUSINESS OUR STAKEHOLDERS • The Uzazi Salama (‘Safe parenting’) initiative aims to strengthen the county’s health systems to support the delivery of quality reproductive, maternal, new-born, child and adolescent healthcare. In November 2021, the M-PESA Foundation in partnership with other stakeholders including the Homabay County government, Amref Health Africa, Action-aid, PharmAccess and Pathfinder launched the project in HomaBay County. Homabay was targeted as it is one of 15 counties in Kenya with poor maternal, child and adolescent health indicators. • In partnership with Gertrude’s Children Hospital, the M-PESA Foundation also launched the Daktari Smart telemedicine programme. This is part of a larger telemedicine initiative that targets over 32 000 children in four counties. To improve maternal health services, the Foundation equipped the hospitals with delivery and post-natal rooms with a capacity of eight beds, as well as a consultation room. Other equipment included wheelchairs, delivery coaches and baby weighing scales as well as laboratory tools. The construction of a septic tank has improved sanitation standards at the health centre, while the installation of an ablution block, and an underground water tank has enabled the hospital to meet its water needs for effective service delivery. ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT Youth account for 35.4% of Kenya’s population and 80% of the country’s unemployed are young people aged between 15–34. Against this backdrop, we focus on opening opportunities for young people through upskilling and entrepreneurial initiatives. • The Wezesha initiative trains cohorts of potential digital/cloud workers, introducing them to the gig economy, improving their soft and hard skills, thereby enhancing their employability. This initiative, which supported 2 050 youth in FY22, was closed out in May 2021. • The Wezesha Generation Programme aims to solve the problem of skills gaps on the one hand and youth unemployment on the other and aims to and provide unemployed youth aged 18–35 across the country with job-ready skills. We achieve this through programmes across five sectors: financial services sales, distributed sales, retail and restaurant, customer service agents and sewing machine operators. As at the end of May 2021 when the project was closed, we had graduated over 8 600 youth, 56% of whom were women, across 53 training locations in 18 counties in Kenya with 14 of these centres located in public and private TVETs. • The Wezesha Agri initiative which was first piloted in 2018, aimed to empower the youth and women by supporting them with access to farm inputs, learning content and the required land infrastructure. We faced certain challenges, key among which was the lack of market linkages for produce and the fact that experiential, rather than digital, learning was preferred by those involved. We are now looking at a partnership with the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) and with Digifarm as technical advisors to establish demonstration farms. We believe this will motivate young people to take up farming and help them develop their skills in this area.