“Gone are the days when women in South Africa are under-represented in the transport sector,” said Nicci Scott, founder of the Commercial Transport Academy (CTA).
Talking to Freight News about the launch of the CTA’s new initiative, “Women inspiring women to lead in transport”, Scott said that close to 1000 women in South Africa’s transport sector would be empowered through three structured programmes: The Iron Women Programme, Run With It and the CTA Excellence Programme.
“All these programmes are of tremendous importance, but the Iron Women programme is something that I am really passionate about,” said Scott. “In this programme, we will develop 495 female truck drivers over the next three years. It will run over four-month cycles, focusing on women in the Johannesburg and Cape Town areas for now. We have done a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get employers on board and willing to take these ladies on. During the four-month programme, each participant will go through training to acquire their commercial and heavy-duty truck driver licences. Once their licences are obtained, the goal is then to empower these women, some of whom will be working for the first time in years,” Scott said.
“We will equip them with various soft skills like budgeting, HIV awareness, thriving in a male-dominated workforce, and many more. There will also be huge focus on assisting them with the technical skills needed to cope and thrive in the supply chain and transport sector,” she added.
Scott said that it was still taboo in many communities for women to be working in the transport sector, but she wanted to encourage all women to build the resilience to succeed. “As women together, we need to pull one another along the journey. We need to look at our organisations and identify areas where policies should be changed and recruitment can be improved.
“A big factor that will determine the success of this initiative is having ongoing support from organisations,” she said.
The initiative is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with strong industry support from Hollard, Volvo, Ctrack, Standard Bank, Onelogix/Trucklogix, the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT), and Commerce Edge.
Freight News will publish the second instalment of the article next week, this time focusing on the “Run With It” programme.
