They may have been dwarfed by the enormous truck behind them, but the cohort of determined young women in pink T-shirts posing in front of its colossal trailer were anything but overshadowed.
The women were all on their way to earning their code 10 or code 14 heavy-vehicle driving licences and taking this beast – or another like it – onto the open road.
The event was part of the official launch by the Commercial Transport Academy (CTA) of the pioneering Women Inspiring Women to Lead in Transport (WIWIT) initiative in the Western Cape.
In November 2021, CTA founder and CEO Nicci Scott kicked off the programme’s operations in the province targeting women from the Atlantis, Dunoon and Philadelphia where unemployment is rife and opportunities are scarce.
The ultimate goal is for more than 900 women nationwide to be empowered through the initiative – not only qualifying as truck drivers, but also working in the transport and logistics sector as entrepreneurs, and in professional roles.
Scott told guests at the launch on 24 February that the aim is to give the trainees exposure to all the different trucks and trailers on South Africa’s roads, making them highly employable.
“For them, getting a driver’s licence is life changing,” she stressed.
“We don’t just need drivers. We need skilled drivers. The heavy commercial truck sector is growing, and e-commerce is growing.”
However, not all trainees will end up as heavy-vehicle drivers – the objective is “to get more women into the transport sector at any level.”
Not only are these aspiring truck drivers undergoing advanced driver training, they’re also enrolled in theoretical training and – in preparation for entering a notoriously dangerous sector with a pitifully low female representation of only about 1,1% in South Africa – vital soft-skills programmes on gender-based violence awareness, HIV and Aids, harassment in the workplace, and personal budgeting.
Western Cape Minister of Finance and Economic Opportunities David Maynier, whose department is supporting WIWIT through providing stipends for the learners, said the trainees are “giving hope to young people”, and partnerships are central to converting learning opportunities to full-time jobs.
Quinton Roos of Trucklogix, a division of OneLogix, noted his organisation had enthusiastically taken up the gender transformation challenge, changing its entire operating structure from being “designed around men only” to one welcoming women into the fold through learnerships, in some cases followed by full-time employment.
“It’s made us better,” he said. “Statistics show that incidents [on the road] involving female drivers are a fraction of those of male drivers. And our fuel use has been better [since women were brought in] – the benefits continue to be shown.”
