Jamba - Career for All

Despite increasing focus and regulatory support, people with disabilities are still more likely to be out of work or without proper training than a person who is not. At the same time, the future of work has transformed everywhere and the demand for digital- and data skills is increasing.

We see a lack of sufficient accessible digital resources for people with disabilities (PWD) to be agile in the growing digital job market. Functioning like a bridge with our e-learning and remote jobs platform, we aim to close the gap between talents with disabilities/health restrictions, and the increasing demand for talent in ICT & AI.

Inclusion of PWD in (future of) work is also tied to their inclusion in society and life. Our platform will be perfectly positioned to scale, remove barriers and raise awareness globally about the skills of PWD.

Number of people living with some form of disability amount to over one billion, forming c.15% of the world population (WHO, Fact Sheet). The ratio in Austria -where our non-profit is based- is similar: 18.4% of the resident population over the age of 15 in private households have a permanent disability. (Micro census survey 2015, Statistics Austria).

We want to contribute to closing the ‘disability employment gap’, which forms the difference between the employment rate of PWD vs. people without disabilities. It is well-known& researched that people with disabilities face barriers in labour market : in eight regions across the world 36% of pwd of working age employed vs. to 60% for persons without disabilities. It is reported that ca.50%-70% of pwd of working age in developed countries are unemployed, while this goes up 80%-90% in developing countries (UN Factsheet). 

On top of this, the job market is transforming imposing new inequalities and vulnerabilities in accessing digital skills and jobs. Workplaces are becoming highly digitized, yet people with disabilities do not have the same opportunities to equip themselves with key skills. Despite several initiatives to create skills&jobs for pwd, there is currently no specific solution in IT/ICT/AI. 

Our purpose at Jamba is to build the skills of pwd through digital-& data skills, and connect them with the companies that are looking for these very resources. Our target audience is both people with disabilities and companies who invest in digital-, data-driven jobs.

We aim to match interests and talents with appropriate trainings (both in-house & through partnerships) and positions through both accessible online/offline offerings. To make our service accessible to a broader community (also non-urban), we are working on an accessible e-learning and job matching portal focused on remote careers.

We equip candidates with the right entry into the transforming future of work through: 

-Inclusive and barrier-free job-oriented training.

-Know how in ICT & AI

-Advancement of essential soft skills and languages (e.g. CV, interview-skills, English trainings) 

We accompany our applicants step by step on their way to a new digital job, and offer continuous support to create long-term added value for both the employee and company.

We envision our final solution to incorporate AI-based algorithms that shift the focus from disabilities to capacities, and help match the talents with suitable training and jobs through our bridging function between pwd and both training &(remote) job providers.

As mentioned in our problem description, persons with disabilities of working age are more likely to be out of work than persons without disabilities (disability employment gap). According to a recent report, in eight regions across the world 36% of pwd of working age are employed compared to 60% for persons without disabilities (2019). Now the accelerating shift in nature of work towards more digital- and data-driven jobs is a new challenge that endangers that pwd without sufficient access to emerging job fields and trainings may be left behind further. Based on an extensive survey with 800 executives, McKinsey found that the COVID-19 crisis has speeded up some workforce trends such as the adoption of automation and digitization, increasing demand for contractors and gig workers, and more remote work.

Given the changing nature of the work with increased integration of digital tools, both the employers’ and employees’ needs are transforming, requiring sustainable methods for finding the necessary digital skill-set. The jobs are increasingly becoming highly digitalized, for which people with disabilities lack equal chances to furnish themselves with key competencies and make themselves agile to be included in the future of work. 

While remote learning and job opportunities increase everyday, there is not a sufficient comprehensive solution and assistance to make these accessible and tailored to the needs of pwd and with a focus on the future of work. Furthermore, a profile- and interest-based matching for a job-oriented education is missing -which makes it harder and harder for pwd and anyone to figure out where to start - as one can easily get lost in the plethora of e-learning offerings online.

At the initial phase, we target unemployed people with disabilities in the age of 20-35, and work on a solution that will focus on entry-level trainings and jobs in ICT&AI fields, which will also integrate an AI-driven decision-support for pwd to choose among education and job offerings. In the next stage of our project we also plan to embed a prejudice-free capacity-based selection guidance for employers that also aims to remove biases from candidate selection.

Covid-19 has already accelerated and exacerbated the unemployment problem, where chances of remote work are not equally distributed across sectors and despite state-measures and incentives, unemployment figures have risen dramatically in Austria like in various other parts of the world during the COVID period. We fear that pwd are now affected even more. Crises are periods that exhibit vulnerability of these less-included groups more vividly, their unemployment and lagging behind both in skills and jobs, can also cause them suffer mentally and psychologically. We see a need for top-down policies such as mandatory hiring to be complemented by innovative bottom-up approaches, where pwd feel included beyond a policy goal but instead  because of their capabilities.

During our on-going research and design thinking process, the idea of targeting immigrants with disabilities came out, too - also based on the diversity and language capabilities of our team. We regard them as facing intersectionality barriers. The similar goes for women with disabilities - where we see not only a higher effect of COVID-19 crisis on employment but also a gender gap in access to education and employment. Triple vulnerability would be posed by an immigrant woman with disability. These are important examples of our target group, and we are passionate about servicing the ones who need assistance the most.

An important part of our innovation process is to research and collect enough data to find the best solutions. In this way, we reach both target groups - people with disabilities and the corporate sector. Using innovation methodologies, our team is currently researching both interests and needs of people with disabilities and the job providers, as well as testing accessibility of certain existing e-learning tools. Our goal is to find out the challenges, needs, backgrounds and interests of people with disabilities in relation to their professional development. In doing so, we also explore their interest in developing themselves in the digital sector and immersing themselves in new types of jobs. 

We already offer entry-level training in ICT & AI for talents with disabilities based on several partnerships with training providers. At the same time, we are not only exploring what talents are needed in companies, especially ICT & AI fields, but also try to raise awareness on why it is important to provoke more employers to open their doors for talents with disabilities. Positive examples can ensure that more can follow.

Our on-going research conducted by our team demonstrates that even though social policy systems and services are well developed in Austria, we see a lack of sufficient training opportunities for professional development for people with disabilities in the ICT and AI fields. There are some players on the market providing trainings in IT sector, but there is still no such initiative in Austria aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the IT, ICT and AI areas. This motivated our desire to focus precisely here, and explore the need and room for improvement in this field.

Our dream is to reach more and more PwD, work together with them and support their capacity building, so they can lift themselves out of poverty. By increasing their qualifications and skills they can get an equal chance for a professional start and career development. In this way, they will be economically and socially active. By presenting successful stories of PwD who already succeeded in finding a job, we will be able to motivate a large number of other people who have lost their faith.

Moreover, through our advocacy campaigns and awareness raising activities, we want to sow the idea in people's minds that change depends on the small steps that each of us makes on a daily basis. In this way, we'd like to contribute to our society in becoming more open-minded, accepting and together ensure accessibility in each part of life.

For us, "digital inclusion" is an important, yet under-addressed topic, as both education and job search processes need to be more inclusive and user-friendly for everyone, including people with disabilities. The human capital resource of PWD is full of potential, and at Jamba we want to enable access to full professional participation in the transforming job market. Our focus on e-learning to empower their potential is also inspired by increasing accessibility and popularity of distance learning. At Jamba, we aim to reach people in rural areas and small settlements too, because everyone needs equal access to social and economic inclusion.

Our non-profit organization “Soziale Zukunft” (social future) was founded in Austria on 30 April 2020. We are still in early stage with our project, immersed in research. Yet, the idea originates from Bulgaria - where the co-founders established Jamba in 2017, since then reaching over 2000 pwd through training & job portal.

We see a big difference between emerging and developed countries in terms of both social policies and accessibility of quality education/jobs. Our initial aim in Austria has been to study the sophisticated market in-depth, also because our focus on ICT/AI and remote jobs is new. We applied for an impact innovation grant from Austrian research funding agency FFG, thanks to which we started researching the market. The collected data from both PWD&job providers will help us innovate for our final innovative platform/solution possibly with additional software/functionalities that can entail access to specific IT/ICT/AI entry-level jobs and training. 

Our innovation process is open to relevant stakeholders through a holistic impact-innovation perspective with a design-thinking approach, allowing also non-linear back&forth. From the very onset of the project, starting with deeper analysis of the problem, we have built a systematic engagement with different parties involved in inclusion of pwd in digital future of work. We try to understand the needs and form a solution set that will also complement existing solutions. Our team wants to create a viable solution

-addressing the market shifts towards digital skills & jobs,

-answering the short- and long-term needs of our target groups,

-implementing a platform-technology to help spread the project online and facilitating access to our services to people living not only in big towns but also small towns

-in next-phase, incorporating AI algorithms in education- and job-matching for a bias-free and smoother, fairer job placement.

What also makes our approach and solution innovative, is that we facilitate a bridging solution between two challenges and work for a two-sided & win-win outcome: addressing the increasing demand for capacities by AI&ICT job providers and widening disability-employment gap.

Many occupations related to ICT, AI and ML are complex and require a lot of training. But there are some entry-level positions for which training is less time-consuming and challenging, such as Quality Assurance /QA/ Specialist, Data Collector, Data Annotator positions which can be useful for pwd to enter the job market and for companies which need help with things like data entry, sentiment analysis and data transcription. 

The total number of people reached through all Jamba networks, Bulgaria, Austria and Hungary amount to more than 2,500 - where Bulgaria forms the major bulk as it is the first operation.

The newly built Jamba Austria project -that focuses on ICT and AI fields, is inspired by the positive results achieved by Jamba Bulgaria since 2017

->600 people with disabilities trained

->340 obtained jobs in local and international companies

->Numerous social events and awareness campaigns

Currently, our project in Austria is young and focused on a research&innovation process for developing a novel and innovative platform solution with which we target to serve 100 people with disabilities in one year, and 6,000 in five years. 

Through our on-going surveys, interviews we are reaching persons with disabilities and collecting their views on challenges, needs and desires regarding professional development. We also work with a few persons with disabilities on a more intensive diary-based methodology to have a better perception of their needs especially on digital platforms, job search and training processes -including our existing offerings.

Although we'd like to reach a wide community going forward that can benefit from online training academy, we have so far maintained a personalized approach, as each person (with disability) has unique needs and questions. Thus, we have the medium- to long-term angle on reaching thousands of people online, but we want to be able to accomodate different needs and a customized approach by expanding our team as well as volunteer community who can respond.

We have created a matrix of KPIs to follow and also create our internal assessments, where we also would like to share the outcomes with the community and the public. We know that not ‘everything that counts cannot be counted', but we think quantifying and also sharing targets with the community would help us in achieving the awareness and social impact we want to create.

# of conducted online and offline training programs in ICT&AI; # of successfully graduating participants; 

Feedback/Level of satisfaction of the participants.

# of job listings; # of registered companies; # of registered candidates with disabilities; # of PDA who found job for at least 6 months with the support of our job board; #of successfully filled job positions.

# of companies using and paying for the recruitment and consulting services. # of successfully hired employees with disabilities

# internship opportunities; # of partnering companies; # of PDA who took part in the internships

Five people work in our solution team,

2 Full-time,

3 part-time,

And we also work with outside experts that guide us in i) innovation-design thinking approach, ii) for exploring the Austrian market and the challenges of people with disabilities.

The JAMBA team in Austria is very diverse and brings a lot of experience from different areas, also carrying a personal mission while working together to reach inclusion.

Iva Tsolova, co-founder and CEO of JAMBA Austria, also co-founded Jamba Bulgaria and brings now this know-how to Austria. She is an expert for small businesses with several years of experience for business development.  

Laura Dumas Kozub, our lead on diversity&inclusion. With >12 yrs in human resource development, gained a lot of international experience in her career so far, including US and Germany as a passionate inclusion advocate who believes in building diverse, equitable and inclusive organizations.

Dr. Selin Öner-Kula is our expert on funding & strategy, with >13yrs experience in investment banking and private companies. Through her doctorate studies, she also specialized in digital platforms and sharing economy. Making digitization work for the common good is her mission. 

Selma Pezerović is our expert of communication & community engagement. With several years of experience in projects related to human rights &minorities, such as Roma community in Croatia, she is also a certified teaching assistant for children with disabilities, refugees and Roma children.

Our IT specialist is Joachim Tecklenburg. He has a graduate degree in medical technology and is happy to contribute his technical know-how of >14 yrs, because he is convinced that accessibility not only improves the lives of people with special needs, but of all of us!  

Our diverse mother tongues: Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish and German & English

We believe in an inclusive future of work that belongs to all. Our mission is to create a bridge between people with disabilities and employers, investing in the capacity building in ICT and AI fields, providing equal access to a career start and development for our talent while addressing skill shortages currently in labor market demand and emerging job fields.

To carry out this mission we understand it takes a group of inclusive leaders aligned to our values of accessibility, inclusion, collaboration, and innovation. Our leaders believe in our vision, are committed to prioritizing our mission, challenge the status quo, and hold others accountable.  We want to gain trust through transparency, and ensure everyone’s perspective is considered in decision making.

Our inclusive leaders must not have all the answers, however, they are aware of their own biases and have a willingness to continuously learn from others. Our leadership team has an open mindset, listens empathically to achieve accessibility&equity. We deeply believe in collaboration, connecting with all those that celebrate differences, create equal access, honor fair treatment, and together build an inclusive future of work.

When it comes to metrics, we measure on impact rather than scale. With a customized approach to DEI efforts, we start with an assessment and meet everyone at their own individual starting point. We measure representation, retention, recruitment processes, and employee engagement, while also analyzing current systems in place. We always start with small steps in the right direction that add up to create transformational change.

One of the main values that our team follows is the idea of co-creation with organizations with a similar vision and mission. Therefore, one of the main reasons that provoked us to apply for Solve is our desire to meet organizations and projects from around the world that contribute to solving the challenge to which we are dedicated. By working together, we will be able to achieve much more together in the long run. We are open to international partnerships and cooperation.

Education and capacity building is a core activity for our team and we believe that the access to eventual academic support and partnership opportunities with MIT would help provide many more opportunities for the development of the group of PWD that JAMBA works with on an international level.

We would be grateful if we could get support and mentorship by experts from the MIT network, who are experienced in the field of international growth of social projects, fundraising for NGOs, and building sustainable partnerships with the institutional and business sectors. Furthermore, we believe we can also benefit from support on assessing our solution and making it widely applicable and inclusive to our target groups, incorporating valuable know-how on applying and improving the used software programs as well as web design. In these ways, we will be able to further develop and fine-tune our solution.

We would be excited to be in connection with MIT faculty and initiatives in the on-going as well as following parts of our innovation process, especially in working towards inclusive algorithms and designs that would lift the benefit derived from our platform solution. For us it is important to create an innovative but at the same time user-friendly solution, and also being able to think and test from diverse angles the inclusiveness and sustainability of our offering.

Also the diverse eco-system of Solve is rich in bright ideas and teams with whom we could cooperate on different aspects and find mutually beneficial synergies.

For us the effects of disabilities or health restrictions in access to labor market can be analogous to different contexts. Although our main focus is people with disabilities we put a special focus on intersectionality barriers such as immigrants with disabilities. These people facing multiple aspects of exclusion are important priorities in our target group, and we are passionate about servicing the ones who need assistance the most.

The origin, gender, and physical or mental conditions can face similar challenges in terms of inclusion where for example for an immigrant "language" can become a barrier in accessing different educational and employment opportunities, whereas for a person with vision impairment the physical condition can lead to exclusion.

In various parts of the world, people with immigration backgrounds suffered higher than average from unemployment issues caused by COVID-19 (OECD). Therefore we put a special emphasis on immigrants with disabilities, and their access to quality education and jobs, and hence to social, economic, financial opportunities.

Digital barriers form still an under-addressed topic, in our view, and given the pace of digitalization, the challenges which are multidimensional are increasing each day. Not everyone has access to the digital sphere or to the opportunities that are afforded by digital platforms, and as a result lack access to valuable information,  knowledge, knowledge networks, digital economy and social & economic values that can be derived through online resources.

Equally important is for those who have access to the digital networks, the algorithms and decision-making tools are not always designed inclusively. This is a critical point that should encourage us to educate and empower more and more people of the challenged groups who can be subject to biases. We need people or geeks, who know what these challenges are from self-experience and can take into consideration how inclusive the defining characteristics of digital resources can be formulated.

Our solution responds to both of these challenges, and we greatly believe in the value of empowering individuals with disabilities through training and job opportunities in the emerging job fields of ICT and AI, who can reflect on and facilitate better web- and digital accessibility.

The AI algorithms underlie many of the systems we now daily use, and work based on data. The history of our data, who we were and are, determines our perception. If we use our data as-is, we might as social scientist Genevieve Bell (Intel vice president) says, reproduce and enshrine really longstanding inequities and bias.

As we design new technology, create or revisit algorithms we need to ask:

1. Which stakeholders are included in programming?
2. What data is used, are biases examined, who’s cleaning the data? What voices are heard when examining these biases?

We believe when we include all stakeholders, create diverse programming teams, carefully examine our data and ensure it is free of biases, we will ensure more voices to be heard. 

At Jamba-Career for All-Austria, our focus is on the future of work. We decided to work on the technology sector, specifically AI, because these are the jobs of the future, and we want to equip people with disabilities (PWD) with the skills of the future. Capacity building of digital skills not only provides an equal opportunity for them to gain a competitive advantage in the labor market, but also provides them with the opportunity to use their own knowledge and skills to design solutions that break down barriers.

This is also our approach to the development of our e-learning and remote job platform, making our best to incorporate empowering algorithms that remove biases and shift the focus from disabilities to capabilities.