Sayna - The innovative digital school

1 - Problem : The International market have growing needs for digital talent recruitment, need service providers to execute quickly, efficiently their digital projects and need more sense in their business. While the local trainings are not accessible to all because too expansive, have obsolete pedagogical content & learning methods, don't teach the soft skills, have outdated infrastructures who can't accommodate in good conditions more talents. No accompaniment to find a job. 

2 - Solution : Sayna is an innovative digital school: we source, train and place the best African digital talents - we get them hired on IT international missions so they can payback the training fees with their first income. 

3 - Impact : Through Sayna, a talent raises his standard of living from less than 1e/day to 60e/day. So he can help his family and his community to go out from precarity.

1 - The extent of the problem in the communities 

By 2030, 230 million jobs will require digital skills & $130 billion could benefit education operators only in the digital sector in sub-Saharan Africa. While, only 700 talents graduate from computer schools in Madagascar and 2000 in Africa.

it takes on average 4 years for a graduate to find a stable job, whereas our talents after 4 to 10 months of training take on average 6 months to find a stable job. 

2 - People affected

As a result, millions of talents in Africa do not have access to this training, mainly for financial reasons, but more importantly they do not have access to the international job market which offers high incomes in the IT sector because of a lack of hard & soft skills. 

Yhe Malagasy population represents 25 million people, 60% of whom are young people under 20 years old and 71% of young live under 2$/day in Africa.

3 - Factors that contribute to the problem / solution

Training in Madagascar & Africa is insufficient in quantity and quality, does not follow international industry trends & standards and are not affordable for everyone.

- How do you work with them to understand their needs and participate in the solution?

We work with young people who live with less than 1e/day, who did not have the financial means to access quality training, who did not have the necessary support & follow-up to meet the requirements of "soft skills "of the labor market. Young people who did not have the opportunity to access digital training because they did not have an internet connection or computers. Young people who did not have access to a network to give them their first professional opportunity.

- How will the solution meet their needs?
We provide a 150m2 room equipped with internet connection, computers, staff made up of managerial talents & IT experts. We advance the training fees so they could start without paying then we're breaking the financial barrier. In fact, we have set up a payback system: we find them a remunerated international mission. Because the local market only offers them low incomes that do not allow them to update their skills and do not guarantee them job security. It is only on the international revenue that we could get payed back safely. 

Sayna's product revolves around a 3-step value chain whose foundation is its training courses. At Sayna, we consider that we have 2 clients: talents and companies.                                                                                               Our value chain is 1/sourcing 2/training 3/ placement in which step we have a promise and a value proposition. 

1/ Sourcing 

The promise & the value proposition for the sourcing is to attract & inspire talents to get trained in digital.

How it works ? 

a - Talent acquisition via social networks & partner schools. b - 42h online test.  c - First Interviews d- 4 weeks of soft-skills e- Final onboarding interview for the tech bootcamp. 

2/ Training

The promise & the value proposition for the training is to deliver training adapted to the requirements of companies and the restraints of talent.

How it works ? 

a- We have a digitized training platform with a personalized human follow-up. b- Our Methodology is #peertopeer #by projects and #learn to learn       c- Talents are learning the soft skills d-  They are Learning the basics of web
development in bootcamp during 3 months (HTML5 - CSS3 - Javascript - Ruby on rails - bootstrap)  e- They finishing with a Specialization in a digital profession during 3 months (Marketing digital, Tech&Data, VideoGames, Cybersecurity, Digital sales)

Our digital platform enable our staff to see in reality the evolution of each trainee. This platform gamifies the training with scores. Talents have projects everyday to accomplish & validate. Talents have access to a network of alumnin, mentors & coachs to help them. This platform enable our staff to evaluate in a precisely way their work. They have also a talent manager who accompanied on all the humans aspects and an IT experts to make them progressed on the technical aspects. 

3/ Placement

The promise & the value proposition for the placement is ensuring to the talent a rapid and successful integration into their first mission. 

How it works ? 
The talent have 2 options to payback Sayna,according to their skills, the training they choose and their availability : 

a- He can enter our sayna factory during 3 or 6 months to work on a project to payback. 

b- He can get hired one of our international missions in remote. 

We are actually, developping a digital marketplace to source the international missions & fit them with our talents in order to scale our model. 

As the first Innovative digital School in Madagascar, we have built an holistic digital learning that included string softskills program as a foundation of our éducation. We have introduced the first 3months bootcamp professionnal Coding program to accelerate occupational integration. Our program is based on learning by doing through professional projects that the student has to realise and launch by the end of the fundamental training.

Our soft skills program lead our talents to self development, to have self-confidence, professional well-being, entrepreneurship mindset, mindset of excellence, emotionnal intelligence, know-how profesionnal relationships. 

While all the African and Madagascar iT schools are only teaching technologies and coding, we - at sayna - are training them to code + digital skills related to the new jobs on demand in the labour market, such as : 

1/ Tech&Data : Developpeur back-end, Developpeur front-end, Developpeur full-stack, devops, Cybersecurity expert, data analyst, data scientist, Analyst BI, videogames

2/ Marketing digital : Growth hacker, Traffic manager, social media manager, expert SEO, expert SEA, content manager 

3/ Design & product : Designer UX, Designer UI, Designer UX/UI, Product manager, product owner, scrum master, 

Our school is opened 24/7 that allow attenders learn and work on their project by night while having a work to get money by day. As we target young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, we make our learning program freely accessible for them with a payback model. It’s the company who hires them who pay 100% of the training fees.

Sayna is an innovative digital school: we source, train and place the best African digital talents - we get them hired on IT international missions so they can payback the training fees with their first income. 

Before the talent arrive @Sayna, they live with less than 1e per day. 

We are seeking the most determined talent with potential around Madagascar through a network of schools and an impactfull story telling. 

We coach them on soft skills as they didn't live in a community and area that encourage, inspire, teach those skills. For most of them, they don't even have toilet at their house, or electricity or running water. 

Then, we teach them digital skills who are in demand on the labour market because they don't have access to training because of lack money, lack of adapted training, no computers or internet. We are delivering the training on our pedagogical platform. 

 We advance the tuition fee  so the money is not a barrier and they can start & finishing the training without paying. 

@Sayna help them to get hired so they can start to payback with their first income at 60e/day. 

By means of our working, they now living with 6Oe/day and they begin to be independant, able to change their own lives but also the lives of their entire family, & community. 

Today, we have now, in 2 years, more than 150 people which their own lives and the lives of their own family has been changed through our work.  

1 - Actually, we are serving more than 150 talents & serving more than 50 companies/business 

2 - At the end of the year, we are planning to train 435 talents & place 311 talents & serving more than 200 companies 

3 - At then end of 2022 we are planning to train 8325 talents & place 4340 talents, & serving more than 2000 companies 

4 - At the end of 2025, we are planning to train 10 000 talents & serving more than 5000 companies. 

Youth-led tech incubation programs such as our, can unleash the potential of digital opportunities in Africa. Sayna proposes a socio-economic convergence and a coordinated Africa-wide strategy, a long-term, well-targeted & coordinated with a capacity building of a pan-African taskforce intervention and thus reach millions of lives directly & indirectly. 

Indeed, in terms of figures, within 5 years, we want to train 10,000 digital talents and become the outsourced African technical department of companies. 

If we train 10,000 talents, more than 10,000 families will be impacted. 

We plan to open SaynaSchools in all the countries of French-speaking Africa in order to have a panafrican impact. 

For next year, our goal is to structure our team, our product and delivery process in order to scale up our model and spread it in Africa and reach millions of young african people with the same backgrounds and needs. 

1/ financial: the cost of infrastructure 

Since our students cannot afford to buy their own laptops as they aim to become digital workers, our first hurdle is to help them acquire a laptop. 

The cost of space being very expensive, our challenge is to control the cost of real estate to ensure healthy and sustainable growth. 

Tax pressure in Madagascar remains high for a young start-up like ours. 

2/ technical
We need to grow our network of IT experts/mentors/teachers for our talents. 
The internet being difficult to access, and knowing that knowledge is now a commodity available on the internet, we and our students need an unlimited broadband connection, which is now very expensive and inaccessible for the majority of our digital learners and workers.

3/ legal
We need to strengthen the "revenue-sharing agreement" contract which is already well established in the United States, but in Madagascar and Africa we are the first to implement it. 
The lack of a legal framework for self-employment is also a barrier for some of the talents. 

4/ cultural
The basic education being very weak, we find ourselves with talents having big gaps in terms of language, behavior but also digital acculturation. Indeed, digital is still a non-existent subject in school curricula. 
As the development of the digital ecosystem is in its infancy today, we are starting from very far away to reach the knowledge base necessary to follow a digital education. 

5/ commercial 
Outsourcing to Madagascar and Africa is already developed but still requires mass evangelization. 

1/ financial: 

We are building a computer assembly workshop where the students can assemble their own computer. We aim to import computer detached pieces by volume from China in order to make the computer cheaper and let the student easily acquire. We actually presenting our campus project to institutional funders to finance our 1 million euros real estate project in containers. 

2/ technical

We actually working with IT freelances in Europe to mentors our students. Our strategy is to target all the African digital worker in France & Europe to be apart of our beautiful community. 

3/ legal

We are lobbying with the government to help edite laws about freelancing & we are working with lawyers and our team to implement in the best way the revenue share agreement. 

4/ cultural

We are developing courses and training for children in public & private schools for the wednesday, saturday and for summer camp. We also develop partnerships with NGO's, and other IT schools and business schools, to increase the skills before the talent arrive at Sayna. 

We are leading the French Tech Antananarivo Hub to develop the IT ecosystem.  

5/ commercial 
We are working with a network of sales freelance in Europe to develop our market and a huge strategy inbound marketing. 

We are actually working with clients based in France & Canada to place the talent we have trained & to deliver digital projects. 

We also begin a collaboration with Germany through salesforce. 

We also have a network of freelances/experts IT/mentors  in Europe to coach our talents & help them get hired. 

We are planning to expand our solution on all the markets of servicenow by training talents on servicenow solution & then place them in their markets to enable servicenow's development. 

Full-time staff : 9

Part-time staff : 0

Contractors : 0

We are a strong team : we have the youth & the experience in the same time. The co-founders are mother (CPO) & daughter (CEO)

Chief Executive Officer : 22 years old, female entrepreneurs with a lot of creativity, vision & capabilities to sale

Chief Product Officer : polytechnical engIneer with more than 30 years in IT and digital projects and programs, with a strong experience in building, leading and managing digital school. 

Chief Operating Officer : 10 years in HR, Graduated in Political Sciences (M2, Europe), in Anthropology (M2,Madagascar), HR management (M Madagascar); certified by the UN in leadership and empowerment of Women; Dedicated HR Manager with practical understanding of business need and human values, with demonstrated strength on evaluating process and determining solutions to increase efficiency. 

Sales & Marketing Director : With more than 14 years in entrepreneurship, strategic counseling in cac40 companies, politics, fortune 500, leading incubators and huge background in HR. 

Chief Financial Officer : Graduated in finance & business management with more than 5 years experience in finance in banks & consulting firms for SMEs. 

Talent acquisition Manager : Graduated in laws & sociology, with a strong human oriented vision with more than 5 years in coaching perfomance & training. 

Office manager : Graduated in business communication & marketing with 2 years experience. 

Digital sales : Graduated in economy, 3 years experience in bank & insurance. Strong capabilities with data treatment and procedures. 

Teachers / mentors / Assistant product manager

We work with the International organization of the french speaking world in order to expand what we are doing in Madagascar. 

We working with schools to expand our assets of students. 

The business model of Sayna is based on 3 streams :

1 - The refund system - Sayna proposes to advance the cost of the student's training called "talent". The talent can payback in 2 ways :

a - Sayna factory. To reimburse the training costs, the talent must work on a project invoiced for 3 or 6 months, depending on the training path chosen.

b - The talent is placed on an international remote freelance assignment at 110$/TDM. 
SAYNA takes a 39% commission corresponding to : 18% of the reimbursement of the training fees for 6 months +18% placement commission and 3% management fees.

If the mission continues after 6 months, Sayna will only charge 21% corresponding to the placement commission and management fees. 

2 - The advance payment system : 
The standard training model where the person is trained and pays in return his training fees. At Sayna, the fees amount to 170 USD per month for 6 months or 12 months depending on the type of training chosen. 

To fund our current and future projects and ensure our path to financial sustainability we plan to : 

1- We are closing a seed round through u BSA Air with business angels to structure ourselves. 

2 - Deploy our sales force and reach our revenue targets, namely 52 talents placed on #SaynaFactory projects, 135 talents placed on #international assignments via the revenue sharing agreement contract & 130 talents in BtoC. 

3 - We are also looking for grants and donations to allow us to invest more in our development & support the social development of our activities. 

 However, these funds are useful to enable us to develop our business rapidly but we expect that by 2021, all our operating expenses will be financed by our sales. 

4 - Possibly use a long term loan. 

We apply to the digital workforce challenge to overcome different barrieres & to help us open different market by training our talent on servicenow technology : 

1/ financial: 

We wanna use the fund to build the computer assembly workshop & to maybe to finance partially our real estate project in containers. 

2/ technical

To develop our range of expert IT & teachers, mentors. 

4/ cultural & commercial :  To accompanie us to sale newmarkets & help servicenow develop by having the best talent of african knowing their solutions ! 

We wanna work with servicenow, MIT, the foundation of Bill & Melinda Gates, Nike & starbucks.