Opportunity

Opportunity is a mobile-based solution to bridge the gap between job vacancies with skilled-refugee labour. By linking the two, Opportunity serves as a mentoring platform to provide professional career coaching as well as an aggregated forum for job search and recruitment for interested job providers and refugees.

Opportunity is a mobile-based solution to bridge the gap between job vacancies with skilled-refugee labour. By linking the two, Opportunity serves as a mentoring platform to provide professional career coaching as well as an aggregated forum for job search and recruitment for interested job providers and refugees.

Opportunity understands integration is key to the expectations of the host nation, where refugees pursue employment opportunities commensurate to their skills and preferences to begin new lives. For Opportunity, refugees are professionals. Once refugees are seen from this lens, it becomes easier to understand that they offer certain skillsets which needs a specific opportunity to be harnessed. By mapping their professional aspirations using career coaching services gives agency to refugees to recognise skills which they have and preferences for certain jobs which they might not be aware of. Meeting these aspirations using a recruitment agency allows refugees gain power to choose occupations for themselves and be informed about employment prospects based on assessment from career coaches. 

Opportunity intends to empower refugees through seamless integration and mentoring at two levels is a key aspect of it. A former refugee who has now begun a new life in the country is the first mentor, providing emotional support and kinship, ensuring the transition of the incoming refugee to the adopted country is smooth. The second mentoring is done by a native, offering valuable cultural education and opening vital doors for the refugee to interact with the host community and expand social networks. 

Thus, Opportunity aspires to make refugees integral citizens in the adopted country by providing aptitude-based professional opportunities, maximising the incoming skills of the refugee. 

The mobile application can be customised to aid refugee integration and employment in any landscape where they face high possibility of unemployment and underemployment.

Under and un-employment of refugees in a rising concern. In Germany only 9% of the accepted refugees in 2015 found jobs with the number of unemployed refugees doubled in 2016. German officials admitted in 2017 that quarter of the incoming refugees could be unemployed in the next five years. In Sweden only 500 of the 163,000 refugees found jobs while their asylum applications were being processed. In Canada, half of the adult refugees have found jobs since arriving in the country while close to 33% Middle Eastern migrants in Australia face unemployment in their first five years in the country.

IF incoming refugees are provided mentoring and career coaching to map skills (known and unknown) and provide a formal skillset THEN recruitment agencies can streamline the hiring process for the refugee optimising their possibilities in the labour market with helping prepare the refugee for interviews and creating and editing resumes BECAUSE refugees are not privy to professional information in their adopted nation and do not have access to information on jobs and employers in sectors which are their specialisation.

The target outcome of the solution is to help refugees integrate into the adopted land through employment which fulfills personal professional aspirations. It has been proved that embarking on a career in an adopted land creates significant acceleration to integration and empowerment, helping refugees adapt to the local language and culture effectively. The impact of the solution is to maximise the professional skills of the refugee which in turn will assist the adopted country economically. The solution is deployed through a mobile application which is available in multiple languages.

Detailed surveys and open channels on feedback will allow Opportunity to keep track of the progress made by service providers and users through the four stages, while the application makes structural adjustments to tackle everyday challenges. - In the first year, 100 users finishing the entire four stage process

Use performance metrics like Performance metrics like application crashes, API latency, end-to-end application latency, app load per period, and network errors - Solve all issues which affect application end-user experience

Continue to track referrals using detailed surveys who have joined the application not just for users but service providers in career coaches, recruitment agencies and mentors as a measure of the success and impact of the enterprise - Increment in users, recruiting mentors for both levels and service providers

There are several mobile applications and websites dedicated to this cause. However, Opportunity challenges larger issues of under and un-employment using career coaching and mentoring as the corner stone to professional success. Opportunity brings together tools under one umbrella which creates permanent career paths that have been mapped using scientific and psychological tools and taken to fruition by recruitment agencies which understand the local labour demand. Using mentors at two stages gives refugees an opportunity at integration. Additionally, Opportunity considers various pitfalls mobile applications face and makes a concerted effort to overcome them at the initial stages of operation.

Opportunity will harness the strengths of the local community of former refugees by co-opting them while its builds and scales its operations before the mobile application begins functioning. By creating active links with informal refugee associations, Opportunity will attempt to understand their needs, and their internet usage behaviour. Engaging with the service providers and surveying potential users before its launch will enhance the trust factor, while understanding their operational strategies and concerns, incorporating them in the applications to create symmetry and coordination with their efforts as well as its own to serve the needs of the refugees.

By creating active links with informal refugee associations, Opportunity will create a word-of-mouth advertisement of its services. Opportunity is also keen to partner with local governments to become part of the refugee welcoming package. The solution will be deployed through smartphones which refugees are known to carry as means of navigating through water and land into asylum countries. Opportunity is a for-profit solution which will charge refugees a token amount upon them receiving employment after the end of the process.

Opportunity will look for seed funding to begin initial operations while continuing to secure revenue and funding as the application scales in operation. 

As Opportunity scales up the operation the application benefits from economies of scale and operating costs would eventually come down. The application does also not require high costs on hardware initially. The cost for the application, maintaining it and the hardware will be financed from part of the income earned from recruitment agencies, career coaches and employers who post their advertisements and jobs dedicated to refugees on the application. The application will buy servers and storage cloud space and ensure that proper data security features are in place, which will be covered from the revenue generated from increased number of users and agencies in the application.

Technological solutions find issues with coordination with actors on the ground, lack of open channels for feedback, and sustainability. Several applications are launched without understanding ground realities and internet usage behaviour of refugee and struggle with trust issues. Opportunity recognises these challenges. However, from the initial stages we are committed to surveying the local landscape to understand the on-ground challenges while taking into the fold possible users and service providers to enhance coordination and assimilate their demands into the final application feature where ever possible.

Opportunity aims to enrich their lives of refugees by assisting them in their foray towards purposeful employment which instills in them confidence and helps them gain a voice in adopted countries. Solve provides us mentors to help us navigate unaccounted for challenges, build effective collaboration, gain entrepreneurial knowledge, understand deeper nuances of problem-solving beyond the academic environment and scale our operations to better serve the ever-increasing population of refugees. At Solve, influenced by mentors and peers who combine their expertise with interests beyond their specialties, Opportunity aims to be a disciplined problem-solving platform to mobilising our greatest asset, our people.

Opportunity comprises of four students (Anjana Shymanath, Astha Ummat, Surabhi Mall and Sayan S. Das) from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. We do not have any financial partners.

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