Werkit Africa

Problem: Prior to COVID-19, 350 million youth were not connected to education, training or formal jobs. The vast majority of that number live in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, 90% of Africa’s youth live in low and lower-middle income countries and the biggest challenge they face is the lack of formal jobs. 

Solution: Connect motivated sub-Saharan African youth to on-demand digital jobs, and provide them with up-skilling tools, and payment solutions.

Impact:  Our vision is to create an end-to-end financial ecosystem where individuals can find digital jobs most suitable for them and chart a path towards financial independence. With the AI Software market expected to show 44% CAGR and reach $126 billion in revenues by 2025 (Statista, 2020), our solution can scale to impact the lives of millions. By connecting African youths to digital jobs we enable personal growth, financial independence whilst stimulating local economies.

We are working to solve the Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Problem:

1. Lack of relevant jobs
   1. lack of infrastructure (internet, computers)
   2. lack of awareness
2. Lack of financial stability 
   1. lack of payments infrastructure
   2. lack of infrastructure (banking solutions/services)

Scale: 

• Zambia: 60% unemployed with highest rates amongst the youth (4.8 out of 17.35 million) as growth in the economy is coming from investment in “wrong sectors”. This creates a growing mismatch between the two in the country (Lusaka Times, 2019).

• Global: Of today’s 420 million African youth, one-third are unemployed, another third are vulnerably employed, and only one in six is in wage employment (AfDB, 2019). Many Africans with advanced qualifications are finding their university degrees are not enough to land a job in the current market. 

Factors fuelling the problem of youth unemployment:

1. Economic development efforts target individual firms or less-productive sectors of the economy, which is ineffective (Brookings, 2016)
2. Technology is reducing the demand for industrial low-skilled workers
3. Traditional job sectors still maintain a high level of gender inequality
4. Economic strategies remain highly fragmented and transaction-oriented, resulting in narrow short-term wins
5. Systematic corruption means that up to 70% of foreign aid funds are skimmed off at the top (UN, 2016)

We are building a financial ecosystem comprised of two key components:

1. A digital jobs platform/marketplace where business partners publish on-demand digital jobs, and individuals complete those jobs to earn money.
2. A payment system allowing individuals to own a digital bank account and access financial services. 

Our digital ecosystem leverages big-data, behavioral economics, habit forming digital experiences, and gamification to optimize quality and manage changes in supply and demand.  

Each key component comprises two verticals:

Digital jobs platform

1. Job delivery platform: hosts on-demand digital jobs and provides individuals with access to a range of jobs based on their skill level. The platform evaluates work quality and manages changes in supply and demand. 

2. Up-skilling Academy: a private social network that hosts online tools and resources for freelancers to up-skill themselves. It also provides a safe space where they can share experiences and help one another.

Payments system

1. Digital banking accounts: Freelancers who qualify, can create a digital bank account to receive payments directly to their accounts rather than via mobile money cash transfers.

2. Financial services: Freelancers who qualify can get access to additional banking and financial services such as debit card issuing, micro-loans, savings plans etc.

Target population:

We are targeting the rapidly growing youth population in sub-Saharan Africa, especially women and students that require flexible working hours and are living under $5 PPP per day. Of Africa’s nearly 420 million youth only one in six is in wage employment. Our current focus is in Zambia and its neighbouring countries. 

Engagement:

• We have surveyed over 6,000 individuals in Zambia to understand their needs and motivations. 

• We conduct face to face video interviews and so far have completed over 250 

• Individuals who qualify to become freelancers are added to a private social network where they can freely communicate with one another as well as with our team, allowing us to have a birds eye view on their behaviours, frustrations, etc.

• We survey our working freelancers using an automated NPS system on an ongoing basis to maintain an understanding of their satisfaction and future needs overtime

Addressing the need:

By providing freelancers with stable access to work we solve their need for employment and financial stability. And by providing them with financial instruments we allow them to transition away from a cash-based lifestyle to one that can support saving and planning for their future. 

Problem: lack of jobs available for people in Africa. 90% of youths live in low/lower-middle income countries and their biggest challenge is the lack of formal jobs (WEF, 2017). Africa’s youth population is expected to reach 1 billion by 2050.

Solution: by giving African’s access to on-demand digital-jobs they can complete from home and up-skilling services, we create good jobs, living wages, digital literacy needed, etc. By adding a layer of necessary financial infrastructure our solution overcomes regional barriers preventing these jobs from becoming available and provides access to digital banking solutions needed to develop financial security, safety nets etc.

The end-to-end solution we offer evaluates each individual's abilities, provides gamified habit-forming work and up-skilling experiences adapted to their skills, and financial solutions where they can begin to save and plan for their future. By doing so we provide an innovative approach to the challenge of harnessing the energy of the world's largest growing population towards more productive employment.

Our competitors include companies such as Samasource, Hive.ai and Cloudfactory who employ individuals to classify data, tag and label images needed to train such models through impact sourcing. We focus on the actual workers’ success and growth over-time, helping them attain financial independence and stability by giving them access to financial tools they do not have. 

Supply side lock-in effect

By providing individuals an end-to-end solution from access to flexible income all the way to the financial tools and services they need to attain their independence we create a strong lock-in effect on the supply side. 

Financial Ecosystem

Through big-data analytics of our workforce we will be able to predict individuals' behaviors and classify them into various risk groups allowing us to offer banking and commerce services at low risk, supporting the local community's financial and economic growth. 

Data-driven behaviour design

Using ML and behavioral economics we create a digital experience that shapes behavior driving up work quality while optimizing supply and demand.

The Werkit job platform and payment ecosystem utilizes existing technologies to develop a new application. On the demand side we utilize a SaaS model and on the supply side we utilize fin-tech business models such as digital wallets, banking, payment gateways, peer-to-peer lending, etc. Our innovation is that we provide an end-to-end solution where individuals can access on-demand jobs as well as enjoy banking and financial services based on their work performance all in one place.

To achieve these goals we utilize big-data, AI, and frameworks such as behavioral economics, and habit forming product design to shape users’ decisions and behavior over time.

We launched our solution in April, 2020 and already provide over 30,000 hours of work available on the platform per month with over 6,000 registered users and 200 actively working freelancers completing an average of 20 work hours per week. All our freelancers are working remotely in sub-Saharan Africa and have been living on less than $5 per person per day. On average our freelancers earn 2 x more than they would in their country of origin.

We launched in April 2020 and within 4 weeks have over 6,000 individuals signed-up to join as freelancers, with 200 actively working and earning. Those who are not able to join as they did not pass our skills tests are given free access to online courses to up-skill themselves and try again.

We track and review our freelancers' work and provide them with job specific feedback they can use to improve their skills and access higher earning opportunities. Through these activities we aim to equip freelancers with technological and digital literacy, durable skills, provide them with access to flexible on-demand work, and help maximize opportunities for financial and personal growth. 

Activities:

1. sourcing of business partners who provide on-demand jobs
2. impact sourcing of talent
3. evaluation of candidates
4. onboarding
5. up-skilling
6. progress reviews and monitoring of personal growth
7. financial planning 

Short-term outcomes:

1. provide a flexible source of income
2. bridge the gap between talent and job opportunities currently available in these markets
3. individuals are spending their time on more productive activities
4. individuals are feeling more secure, worry less about their future and have an increased level of confidence

Here are some of our freelancers response to Werkit:

• “I believe it’s a great opportunity for people to become self-sufficient.”

• "Especially during this time where the Covid19 virus is around us! Indoors is the new normal! Most people are jobless so this is good income! You also get exposed to topics that improve your personal general information! It also improves your English writing skills which can come in handy during publications or doing dissertations. And in Zambia it’s rare to have experience in handling qualitative data and transcribing so this also is good for one's CV!”

• “Working under Werkit has been a really stress-free experience because I know I can trust and rely on them.”

The long-term impact:

• reduced poverty
• increase in digital literacy
• increased gender equality in the job market
• improved mental health
• increased happiness 
• stimulation of the economy by an increased spending capability of the population

Currently we have 200 active freelancers, who are working and earning on the platform of which 55% are women, 52% are students and 77.67% were fully unemployed. We are growing x 8 month on month with a $1 per day spend on ads.

Conservatively, with the right funding, we project that we can employ over 10,00 freelancers within the year and reach over 3,000,000 by the end of 2025.

Our target outcomes:

The long term-impact is that Africans, especially youths, women and students living under $5 per person per day will become digitally literate, have access to stable income, and banking services. Our impact metrics:

• number of people exiting poverty
• number of people removed from full unemployment
• percentages of women participating in the workforce
• amount of people trained/working in digital jobs (literacy measurement)
• amount of foreign currency entering the local African economies
• amount of people using a Werkit digital bank account
• amount of people who participate in a income savings program

Since our launch in April 2020 to date (May 8, 2020) we have employed 200 people of which:

• 105 female
• 54 students 
• 80 fully-unemployed 

Milestones to achieve this goal

Phase 1: 

1. partner with debit/payroll card issuer
2. launch the digital banking solution MVP & find product/market-fit
3. develop and deploy a platform that can support multiple business partners 

Phase 2:

1. sign contracts and integrate with 2 additional business partners
2. deploy regional operations team and infrastructure
3. deploy big-data infrastructure
4. monitor operational progress

Phase 3: 

1. measure impact
2. refine product or enhance and scale operations

We expect the majority of the challenges in setting up a remote freelance workforce and payment systems in Africa to arise from the region’s lack of legal, financial, connectivity and general civil infrastructure. We expect to face challenges in ensuring our implementation leverages local cultural habits and integrates well within the countries we operate in. Additionally, as we scale we will need to ensure our technology is robust enough, yet considers infrastructure limitations in the markets we enter.

Operational:

• operating in diverse legal jurisdictions
• developing a cost efficient partner integration process
• developing regional teams to support rapid expansion
• supporting regional limitations such as slow internet connection, electricity shutdowns, lack of infrastructure
• fraud 

Product:

• optimizing supply and demand
• maintaining work quality of a large distributed workforce
• developing user experiences that drive up-skilling
• preventing fraud and security breaches
• developing a cost effective freelancer management processes (payments, support, up-skilling, etc.)

Team: our leadership team consists of individuals who have worked/grown up in Africa. This allows us to navigate through the continent with local knowledge, expertise and a pre-existing network. Understanding where we operate is key to solving our operational challenges. 

Local Presence: we plan to set-up local offices where we operate in order to provide a workplace that has unaffected limitations such as internet connectivity and lack of electricity.  

Strategic Partnerships: we will partner with local educational institutions and government agencies to enable us. We will also partner with global organizations and launch programs dedicated to providing work opportunities and reducing poverty in the continent. 

To deliver a seamless product experience we:

• hire highly qualified technical teams
• collaborate with behavioral economics experts to ensure the product is consumer-led (in active communication with Nobel Prize winner Dan Ariely and his team).
• experiment to deliver optimal solutions that balances supply and demand

2 Full-Time

We also have a team of interns covering UI, UX, frontend and backend engineers, and customer success.

Alon Shalvi: CEO & Founder

• Leadership/Strategy/Product Development 
• Founder @Werkit Africa(2020). Founded @Practix Innovative Workout (2015). 
• +15 years experience leading teams, start-ups, and delivering complex products to market
• Lived in Israel, Nigeria, Spain and USA

Krishma Nayee: Co-Founder, Impact

• Sales/Strategy/Marketing 
• Co-founded @WerkitAfrica (2020). Founded impact driven agri start-up @Zaamroot (2018) 
• +10 years working in international development and economic policy development
• Ex- @what3words, @World Bank, @ODI, @globalgiving
• Lived in Zambia, UK, France, USA 

• Out of Line Ventures - innovative venture capital founded by Nobel Prize winner Dan Ariely, to help utilizing behavioral economics to design a better future. Collaborating on developing an ethical business model and empowering youth through behavioral economics

• FNB Bank Zambia - developing better payment solution customized for the needs of low-middle income individuals

• Antler - a global early-stage VC firm that builds and invests in groundbreaking technology companies. Collaborating to expand our reach across sub-Saharan Africa.

• The Global Development Incubator - incubating partnerships to spark collective change and lay the foundations for promising organizations. Working together to enhance our social impact and reach in the continent. 

• Twilio Startup Program - serving startup founders all over the world through education, mentoring, and introductions. Helping us develop a digital scalable solution and helping us avoid common startup hurdles. 

Customers:

Software companies using artificial intelligence and machine learning in need of training-data as well as organizations in need of data labelling, enrichment, tagging, archive digitization, and other digital tasks.

The AI software market is expected to have a 44% CAGR in the next 5 years (Tractica, 2019) with most machine-learning algorithms needing to be trained on voluminous datasets, which translates into thousands and thousands of human hours of work (WEF, 2019).

Beneficiaries:

African youth seeking work, especially women and students that require more flexible working hours and are living below $5 per person per day. Of today’s 420 million African youth, one-third are unemployed, another third are vulnerably employed, and only one in six is in wage employment (AfDB, 2019). Many Africans with advanced qualifications are finding their university degrees are not enough to land a job in the current market and without an income comes the lack of access to finance.

Werkit is a digital ecosystem where business partners publish on-demand digital jobs, and individuals complete those jobs to earn money and attain financial stability and independence. 

Products and services:

1. Impact sourcing of high quality digital workforce
2. Workforce training and up-skilling
3. Access to digital banking
4. Financial and banking services

Revenue streams:

1. Payment per job completed
2. Banking and financial services 
3. Referral/Affiliate programs 

To make sure we run an ethical organization we have applied to join the GISC and Out of Line ventures, a VC led by Dan Ariely that utilizes behavioral economics to design a better future.

Revenues:

Our business model unit economics are profitable from the get go. Within one month of being operational we already have recurring revenues from our impact sourcing services and are growing x 8 month on month. We are in the process of establishing our first affiliate program with a digital education platform and a partnership with a leading global payments & technology company. We expect to have all three revenue streams operational within the next quarter.

Grants:

We have a dedicated team assigned to finding various grant opportunities. This is a key funding source to enable our activities in the local regions and support rapid growth. 

Capital Investments:

We are discussing capital investment opportunities with various angels and venture capital funds to accelerate growth.

We believe that technology can drive meaningful impact. 

We believe that MIT can provide us with the insight we need to ensure our product is built out in an innovative and user-centric way. A core part of our solution is to create a data driven platform leveraging behavioral economics and habit forming product design. We believe MIT has the resources and knowledge base to actualise our vision.

As we scale in sub-Saharan Africa we see value in MIT's governmental connections to push through our policies to scale the accessibility for our solution, especially in the financial sector. Gaining access to MIT’s  network of professors as well as business leaders, will propel us in the right direction to accelerate our growth whilst building an impeccable technical solution. 

Finally, we are an impact-driven company and would benefit from partnering with strategic advisors who would be able to guide us in a direction that integrates both ethics and profitability. 

Our mission to help individuals achieve financial independence will require a mix of technologies as well as behavioral and psychological frameworks. Additionally, our target region is known for its complex legal structures and limited infrastructure. Having as much support in these areas will allow us to increase our chances of success and speed in overcoming these challenges and expand our mission to those who could benefit from it.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab - we want to create a solution that optimises supply and demand in an efficient way whilst taking into account cultural behavioural norms in the markets we launch. MIT's lab would be a great thinking and product development partner for our solution.

Solvers like Moringa School - Moringa School rapidly and efficiently up-skills graduates in Africa digitally. We  can rapidly and efficiently provide their graduates with immediate income generating opportunities. We are looking at the same markets and can both scale together.

Mastercard Foundation - Given the lack of data on people’s financial profiles in Africa, organisations are unable to offer banking and other commerce services as they do in parts of the developed world. A partnership with Mastercard could propel us into providing financial services to our large pool of verified freelancers. 

One of our impact KPI directly addresses female participation in the workforce. We are targeting the rapidly growing youth population in sub-Saharan Africa, especially women and students that require flexible working hours and are living under $5 PPP per day. 

Werkit offers part-time, flexible, digital ups-killing jobs to the local, as well as training, and other resources to help freelancers succeed. It has no gender bias. Young women as well as mothers at home who are unable to commit to a full-time job will have access to part-time work, earning the same as men.

Currently we have 109 active freelancers, who are working and earning on the platform of which 55% are women and this is a number that grows weekly.

We will use the Innovation for Women Prize award to ensure we are engaging more women into the workforce.

Our solution directly addresses the aim of this prize. Africa will be home to 1 billion young people, of which 1 in 6 is not in formal employment (WEF, 2019). The root cause of the problem is a mismatch between the education they are getting and jobs available in the markets they live in.

We are living in an especially changing time today. The restrictions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic mean that individuals are staying at home and are unable to earn money as they normally would. Access to digital work opportunities is paramount now more than it has ever been before.

Werkit is a digital hub where business partners publish on-demand digital jobs, and individuals complete those jobs to earn money and get paid. We also provide our freelancers with up-skilling tools to improve their digital skills and payment solutions that were not available to them before. 

We launched in April 2020 in one country and already provide over 30,000 hours of work per month to our team of 109 freelancers. We have over 5,000 additional candidates in the process, qualifying to join as freelancers. 

This funding will enable us to scale as well as diversify our delivery of access of work to our freelancers. We will use the money to ensure a range of work is available for all skill-types.

Our solution is built to increase digital literacy. All the work completed by our freelancers is done online. We provide up-skilling tools that helps them progress through their journey with us and earn more.

A large portion of the work we provide our community of freelancers, is transcription based. The files are usually education and media files, which provides content that they can learn more from. In addition to this we provide free online courses where our freelancers can up-skill.

Our solution promotes remote work and can easily be piloted in Portugal. We have access to a range of files in various languages. Our entire process is built to scale. This allows us to easily roll out our solution in any country.  

Our clients are software companies using artificial intelligence and machine learning in need of training-data as well as organizations in need of data labeling, enrichment, tagging, archive digitization, and other digital tasks. The AI software market is expected to have a 44% CAGR in the next 5 years (Tractica, 2019) with most machine-learning algorithms needing to be trained on voluminous datasets, which translates into thousands and thousands of human hours of work (WEF, 2019).

There is an opportunity to use the work generated in this field to create a new sector of work. Humans are still needed to recognise and judge complex. We are providing access to this work through our platform that publishes these on-demand digital jobs, where individuals complete those jobs to earn money and attain financial stability and independence. 

Internally we utilize big-data, AI, and frameworks such as behavioural economics, and habit forming product design to shape our users’ decisions and behaviours. This creates a two-pronged solution, where freelancers are encouraged to up-skill, work and earn money whilst clients know that they will receive good quality, efficient work. 

We will use this funding to build our our solution.