Amazon has opened a special place called the AWS Skills Center in South Africa. This is the first time they're doing this outside of the United States. The goal is to give free training to people in this area.
A report from the World Economic Forum in 2023 says that many companies see two big problems: not having the right skills (60% of companies) and not being able to find the right workers (53%). In the next five years, more than 75% of these companies want to use things like big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. This means they'll need a lot of people who know about these things, and around 2.6 million new jobs could be created by 2027.
To help with this, Amazon's web service part, called AWS, has started a Skills Center in Cape Town, South Africa. This is their third center like this. Maureen Lonergan, who is in charge of training and certification at AWS, says they want to help people get the skills they need for better jobs. She thinks there are a lot of talented people in Cape Town, and if they learn new things, it can help South Africa grow and change.
This new center in Cape Town is designed to help more people in the community get better at their jobs. One of the main goals is to teach people who aren't experts in technical things. They want to provide free education so that more people can learn about cloud computing and similar things.
The Skills Center will be a place where anyone can come to learn. It doesn't matter where you're from, how much you've studied before, or how much money you have. AWS wants to create a group of people who know about cloud computers and can work in this field.
Since 2017, AWS has helped more than 100,000 people in South Africa learn about cloud skills. They gave training for free and also had some programs that people paid for. Last year, they started something called AWS re/Start in six African countries, including places like Ghana and Nigeria. This helps people who want to work with cloud computers get better skills.
But this isn't just about South Africa. Amazon wants to give free training to 29 million people all over the world by 2025. Alan Winde, who is in charge of the Western Cape, says they're happy to work with AWS. He believes that investing in people now will make South Africa stronger in the future.
This story also goes back in time. A person from South Africa named Chris Pinkham talked to Jeff Bezos in 2003. Pinkham wanted to start a cloud computing business. This became AWS, which is now a big part of Amazon. Pinkham and a team in Cape Town helped create AWS. Some big companies in South Africa, like Absa and Standard Bank, use the things they make.
In 2010, Amazon opened a store in Cape Town to help shoppers. This also created new jobs. Ten years later, they opened a big computer shop in Cape Town for AWS.
But there have been some problems. Some people from the Khoi and San groups say Amazon is doing bad things on their land. They think Amazon is not respecting their sacred sites. This has caused some legal problems. This year, a court didn't let these groups stop the building of Amazon's office in Cape Town.
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