The company has partnered with Gandhinagar-based Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) to provide training to small businesses.
Facebook will hire 20,000 entrepreneurs from India in the coming six months. This is part of their ‘Boost Your Business’ programme, which plans to help businessmen scale up their businesses. This hiring will be across 100 cities of India.
The main idea is to connect these entrepreneurs through Facebook and help them grow their businesses. The entrepreneurs under this programme will be equipped with knowledge, skill and technology, so that they can grow and scale up their business across the globe.
As per the company, India has 201 million active people on Facebook, with 95 per cent of them accessing it on the mobile. Globally, over 65 million SMBs have pages on Facebook, and 57 per cent people on Facebook in India are connected to at least one small business.
The company has partnered with Gandhinagar-based Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) to provide training to small businesses.
Ritesh Mehta, head of programmes, South Asia, said that the ‘Boost Your Business’ initiative was launched in 2015, but with EDII, they plan to go to 20 states and 100 cities in the next six months in its first phase, expanding five times than what they have achieved so far.
The benefit of these connections will be decrease in the cost of business, where businesses can connect with customers through Facebook pages and market their products and services online, for free. The budget allocated for marketing can be utilised to grow the business, hire more staff, and so on.
Mehta believes that with these connections businesses can reach many more customers, and grow not just within the country but outside as well.
This initiative by Facebook is part of their public partnership policy, where the main idea is to give back to the community.