Cabanga Platforms has opened Setsebi.Africa, a regional register of corporate training practitioners and team-building providers. The platform addresses a problem that is well known inside companies and almost never written about: the training a business needs usually exists somewhere in the market, and there is no reliable way to find the person who delivers it.
Setsebi is not a course catalogue. It lists people rather than scheduled courses, on the argument that most real training needs are specific to a company and are met by a practitioner building to a brief, not by buying a seat on something already written. An organisation describes what its people need to be able to do afterwards. A person at Cabanga reads the brief and makes the introduction. The organisation then contracts with the practitioner directly.
The problem it addresses
Corporate training in the region is overwhelmingly outsourced, and discovery is left to word of mouth. That works while the need falls inside a manager’s existing network and fails the moment it does not. The result is familiar: a company that needs its supervisors trained in labour law ends up with whoever answered the phone, or postpones the training entirely.
The supply side has the mirror-image problem. Experienced practitioners – people who have run a finance function, a safety programme, a procurement desk – are largely invisible to the companies that would hire them, because there has been nowhere to be visible.
How the platform is organised
Setsebi sorts the register on three axes, which is the substance of the product and the reason a brief can be matched quickly.
– Organisational level. Seven levels, from frontline and operations through supervisory, senior management and executive, plus one for a whole team across levels. The same subject taught to the board and to a shift team are two different jobs, so the register asks who needs the training before it asks anything else.
– Discipline. Seventeen disciplines at launch, including leadership and management, corporate governance, occupational health and safety, finance for non-financial managers, human resources and labour law, digital skills and artificial intelligence and team building and culture. New disciplines are added when demand shows them rather than in advance.
– Delivery mode. On site, off site, live virtual, hybrid, blended, or a keynote at a conference or company event. Cross-border delivery is treated as normal rather than exceptional, which is the practical effect of the platform covering four markets as one.
A keynote is handled as a delivery mode and not as a separate subject, on the reasoning that a keynote on governance is still governance. The buyer chooses the expertise first and the format second.
The listing standard, and its limits
Setsebi applies a single test to every listing, described on the platform as the practitioner test: would a serious company hire this person to do the job, not merely to teach it. Someone who has run the function is listed; someone who has only studied it is not.
Two checks sit behind a listing. A one-time code is sent to the email address given, and nothing is recorded until that code comes back, which also prevents anyone being listed without their knowledge. A person at Cabanga then confirms that the practitioner does the work they claim and speaks to references where they are given. Until both checks have run for a listing, the listing says so in plain words. There is no partially listed state.
The platform is unusually explicit about what its checks do not establish. A published compliance page sets out that Setsebi does not verify statutory registration on a live basis, is not an accreditation body, does not confirm insurance or tax standing, and cannot judge whether a practitioner suits a particular brief – and asks buyers to carry out their own due diligence before contracting.
“Every company reaches a point where somebody has to be trained and nobody knows who to call. The people who do that work well are already out there and they are already good. What has never existed is a place where the two find each other. We are not claiming to have vetted the world. We are saying we know this market, we will check what can be checked, we will tell you plainly what we have not checked, and then we will introduce you to somebody who does this for a living.”
Oscar Manduku-Habeenzu, Founder, Cabanga Platforms
Why Cabanga Platforms is building it
Setsebi does not start from an empty database. Cabanga Africa has published regional business magazines since 2017 – twelve editions and two journals, circulating across twenty-four countries – and the audience contains both sides of this particular market at once. The readership is business owners, executives and senior professionals, who buy training. The contributors and specialists who fill those pages deliver it. Details of that network are published on the platform.
Setsebi is the latest platform Cabanga Platforms has built on the same pattern: a register anyone can read, and an introduction made by a person rather than an algorithm.
Availability and cost
– Posting a training need is free, requires no account and takes about two minutes: https://setsebi.africa/post/
– Practitioners, training firms and team-building providers can apply to be listed at no cost: https://setsebi.africa/join/
– The platform runs in the browser and installs to a phone or desktop as an app. It is live now at https://setsebi.africa and covers Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
About Setsebi
Setsebi introduces organisations that need staff trained to the training practitioners, training firms and team-building providers who deliver that work. It does not employ facilitators, host courses or award qualifications, and it is not an accreditation body. The name is Setswana for the one who knows. More at https://setsebi.africa/about/.
About Cabanga Platforms
Cabanga Platforms is the platform business of Cabanga Africa (Pty) Ltd, a pan-African business media and digital infrastructure group founded in 2017. The group publishes twelve regional magazine editions and two journals circulating across twenty-four countries as Cabanga Africa, and builds registers and marketplaces for the southern African corridor as Cabanga Platforms. It operates from Gaborone, Johannesburg and Chinhoyi.
Media contact
Cabanga Africa (Pty) Ltd
info@cabanga.africa
Desks take calls and WhatsApp on +267 78 467 445 and +27 69 342 8500. Written enquiries reach the same desks through the contact page.
