Jumia and Facebook have collaborated to empower small and medium scale enterprises in Nigeria with free training on business growth accelerators, effective customer engagement strategy and advertising.

According to the companies, 'hundreds of Jumia sellers' attended the empowerment programme, hosted recently at Facebook's NGHub.

Attendees learnt how to list and sell products on the e-commerce platform via the seller centre, factors that affect sales on Jumia and top factors that determine pricing.

Other topics covered also included how sellers can build and create content for their business pages on Facebook and how they can advertise their businesses on Facebook.

Charles De Moucheron, Head of Jumia Force (J-Force) Africa, said: "The purpose of this training is to enable our sellers and partners to grow their businesses online. This means allowing the sellers to not only be successful on Jumia but also to fetch customers and bring them to their stores through Facebook. We expect that the sellers will implement what they learnt from this training to boost their sales and drive more traffic to their stores."

Elizabeth Ajala, Senior Community Trainer, Facebook Small Business Team added: "The Facebook boost with Jumia programme is about empowering small businesses by making it possible for them to take advantage of the endless opportunities that are available online. I believe this training has given the Jumia sellers the ability to reach people where they spend their time."

This week Jumia made headlines after announcing it has ceased operations in Cameroon.

ITWeb Africa reported that the NYSE-listed company shut down its offices and its e-commerce portal for Cameroon is no longer active as of 18 November 2019.

The e-commerce giant began operations in the country in 2014 and until last year, remained profitable.

However a challenging economic environment and socio-political tensions in the country, along with repeated internet shutdowns between 2017 and 2018, have had an adverse impact.