Jack Ma announces projects for African students and entrepreneurs

Chinese e-commerce giant and founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, have announced four projects that will exclusively benefit African students and entrepreneurs.
Jack Ma announced this during the just-concluded three-day continental YouthConnekt Africa Summit which was taking place at the Kigali Convention Centre.
He said one of the projects will focus on offering study opportunities to 200 young entrepreneurs to study e-commerce and artificial intelligence in China every year, which he later confirmed will kick-off before the end of this year.
“We are already working with Paradise Foundation and before the end of this year we shall have finished the plans to kick start the first project where we’ll be inviting 200 African entrepreneurs to Hangzhou, China to study e-commerce,” he said while addressing the press.
Jack Ma, under his Alibaba Group, wants to work with universities and governments in Africa to teach African students the e-commerce skills, internet, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, among others.
“I think e-commerce, big data, and internet is the future. You can never stop them whether you like it or not. Moreover, the world is transforming from IT (information technology) to DT (data transformation) and these transformations will create millions of new jobs,” he noted.
While some African people tend to think that emerging technologies come to render their jobs redundant, Jack Ma clearly indicated that data transformation is the future of Africa and that countries should start preparing today.
“You (Africa) don’t have jobs that will be destroyed because you don’t have a lot of jobs today. Europe has a lot of jobs, and America has a lot of jobs based on yesterday’s model. Africa should start to prepare now through providing educational skills,” he added.
Jack Ma also plans to give prizes every year to fifty game rangers up to the next ten years, as well as establishment of Africa Young Entrepreneur Fund, a USD10 million fund to promote the African entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Piece of advice to the young people
Speaking during the Panel discussion, “Meet the Leaders — Expanding Opportunities for Youth”, Jack Ma encouraged African youth and entrepreneurs to use their knowledge to contribute to advancing the continent.
“Nobody in this world has advanced knowledge. No matter how much knowledge you have, you are always not enough. The thing is how to make use of the knowledge we have and keep on learning every day. The best knowledge I have is the knowledge to face failure,” he said
“If you saw me, I was not like this, ten years ago. One hundred mistakes equals to one success. I would like to advice that spend more time learning the failures of people than their success,” he added.
meanwhile, the summit was running under the theme from Potential to Success and it brought together more than 2,800 youth from 90 different countries.
