After India, youth in South Africa to benefit from Microsoft’s Project Sangam
New Delhi, April 09, 2018: Reinforcing its commitment to bridge the widening skill gap, Microsoft is expanding the capabilities of its Project Sangam to emerging markets across India, Middle East, and Africa. Project Sangam, first launched in India, is a cloud hosted platform that leverages Azure services and the power of LinkedIn to support new entrants to the job market and enable key stakeholders across the skilling ecosystem including candidates, training organizations, employers and the government.
As part of the expansion, Microsoft South Africa and the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) have recently launched Thint’iMillion, an online mass learning system, as part of the Tshepo 1Million Digital Mass learning programme. The Thint’iMillion programme will be deployed on Project Sangam allowing young people to access content via an on-phone app (Android only), tablet mode (Windows and Android) as well as an interactive web portal. Through the wider Tshepo 1Million initiative, GPG aims to provide 1 million young jobseekers with skills to make them more employable.
“Our vision is to empower every organization and individual to achieve more, and this is clearly a step in that direction. Lack of skilled resources is one of the key issues that governments across the world are facing. There is an enormous scope for technology to come in to address the skill gap that exists in the work force today,” said Mr. Anil Bhansali, Corporate Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D) Private Limited. “Sangam was envisioned because of what we observed in India, however its relevance spans across geographies. It is the first project that wields the combined strength of LinkedIn and Microsoft to tackle the challenge of how to provide every person the opportunity to skill themselves for the jobs that are going to be available in the future,” he added.
About Microsoft India
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 8,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research and development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local datacentres to accelerate digital transformation across Indian start-ups, businesses, and government agencies. In 2016, Microsoft opened one of its eight Cyber Security Engagement Centres in the country, to address security needs of both public and private sectors.