South Africa has one of the world’s highest unemployment rates. According to Reuters, the country’s unemployment rate is 34.5%, and there are 7.921 million unemployed people. How this woman is reducing unemployment in South Africa by teaching mine workers how to operate heavy machinery
Maggie Moila decided to start her own business by providing skills training and financial literacy in response to South Africa’s high unemployment rate. In this regard, she established the Fundza Training Institute in 2015 to teach mine workers how to operate heavy machinery as well as to provide financial literacy education.
Moila has worked for major corporations such as Anglo-Mogalakwena American’s mine and Ivanplats mine in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. Her entrepreneurial journey, however, began with teaching financial literacy.
Moila became a registered debt counselor after realizing that many South African youth lacked financial literacy education. As a result, they were exposed to poor and risky financial decisions that jeopardized their financial situation.
According to IOL, she began training and educating local communities on how to manage and invest their finances, including Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) on business start-ups and mentoring.
She later expanded her training institute’s accreditation to include lifting machines, earth-moving machines, and first aid. This was after she noticed that many people, particularly young people, lacked the necessary skills to work in the mining industry. As a result, she decided to open a training center to provide them with those skills.
By deciding to venture into providing skills to unskilled youth to go into mining, Moila was venturing into a territory dominated by white males.
“Being a black woman in a white male-dominated industry, I had to work 10 times harder, just to be recognized and taken into consideration, but I saw it as a motivation,” she told IOL.
She teaches people how to operate earth-moving machines like excavators and tipper tracks, as well as lift machinery like telescopic boom handlers and mobile elevated platform operators, according to the outlet. She is also involved in crane operation, first aid, and firefighting.