This is the NSC Olimpiyskiy Stadium in Kyiv. Last May it hosted the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool. Now imagine this stadium full of people… that is how many people are starting to work for Careem each month.
Here at Careem we are creating between 60,000 and 70,000 jobs per month, so despite being seen largely as a ride-hailing company, the biggest impact Careem has is not moving people, but rather, giving people jobs.
Having launched in Dubai in 2012, Careem has rapidly expanded to have a presence in 14 countries and 100 cities across the wider MENA region in just under six years. In that time, we have created over 850,000 job opportunities for Captains, and our presence is having a positive socio-economic impact in the markets in which we operate.
With more than 24 million customers we can generate steady incomes for the Captains who work with Careem. There were a lot of people in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt who were not employed, or were under-employed, but now they have become productive members of society.
Approximately 75,000 Saudi nationals now earn a full- or part-time income by providing services on Careem’s platform, and from June that includes women. We’ve now overtaken Saudi Aramco as the biggest employer in the Kingdom. And to date, our Captains in Saudi have earned around $200 million through Careem rides, bonuses and guarantees. In Egypt, the number is close to 100,000 while in Pakistan the Careem fleet has over 275,000 Captains.
We’ve also launched in Palestine because we saw that there were a lot of lives there that could be improved, then in Iraq and most recently, in Sudan. We’re building a service that can improve the lives of people wherever it goes by giving them an income-generating opportunity as well as mobility.
We said in the early years that “our goal is to create one million jobs across the MENA region by the end of 2018”. Well, we haven’t quite reached that mark yet, but we are well on track and in the time it’s taken you to read this, five more people have just started working for Careem.