WOMENT by lingkaran

623,000 women workers were laid off during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia. Meanwhile, COVID-19 pandemic is successfully accelerated digital transformation, technology, and automation. 

To solve the problem and maximize the opportunity, we need to navigate transitions that could put women on a path to be more productive, capture more job opportunities, and get better-paid work in the digital and technology-driven economy of the future.

We initiate WOMENT, an 8-week digital capabilities and skills enhancement bootcamp for women’s future of work – to enhance Women Empowerment, Development, and Employment in Indonesia.

This solution will attempt to solve the problems through:

1. Online learning contents that are relevant for empowering and developing women's future of work
2. Hybrid experience, combination of LMS (self-paced), and interactive mentoring to maximize personalization and engagement
3. Project group challenge that will cultivate a collaborative environment and bring real-life experiences to produce their working portfolios

Meet Rahayu!

She was a 27-years old worker who was laid off from her job as Customer Service and Front-liner in a fashion store during the COVID-19 outbreak in Indonesia, in 2020. She was struggling to find work for a while and relied on her remaining savings to support her daily life.

And Rahayu is not the only one. There are 623,000 women workers who were laid off during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia. Whereas, only 39.2% of the total workforces in Indonesia are women and they are 1.8x more vulnerable to crises than men. Not to mention other related issues such as increased unpaid care and domestic workload and suffered a larger mental health setback experienced by more women than men.

On the other hand, this COVID-19 pandemic is actually a blessing in disguise. It successfully accelerated digital transformation, technology, and automation. It will also increase 180% of the digital economy while displacing 23 million existing jobs with 27-46 million new jobs. Thus, bring up new challenges – Indonesia will be facing 600,000 digital talent shortages per year.

Our solution will be focusing to empower and develop women and young moms who still pursue their careers, ranging from 24 -30 years old. Most of them live in peri-urban and urban with low to middle income.

To understand their needs, we started to research some of our targets. Based on the research we have done, it can be concluded that what our target needs is how a woman can remain productive, especially in dealing with layoffs during the pandemic, as well as in dealing with the work gap that occurs between men and women.

The way that we do to encourage them to achieve their goals is to create learning programs to support skills, both hard skills and soft skills.

Through this step, we believe that the problems faced by our targets will be able to help them to face the challenges of work in the future

Challenge

The workforces of Indonesia are increasingly susceptible to major changes driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution — changes that have been exacerbated by the economic disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. By 2030, automation is expected to displace an estimated 23 million jobs in Indonesia — including 12 million jobs held by women.

Dimension

Equip existing workers in India and Indonesia with country-appropriate and culturally-relevant digital literacy skills and vocational training opportunities.

We also trying to solve the same problem, that there are 623,000 women workers who were laid off during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia. Whereas, only 39.2% of the total workforces in Indonesia are women and they are 1.8x more vulnerable to crises than men. Not to mention other related issues such as increased unpaid care and domestic workload and suffered a larger mental health setback experienced by more women than men.

That's why we come up with an educational solution, to navigating transitions that could put women on a path to be more productive, capture more job opportunities, and get better-paid work in the digital and technology-driven economy of the future. We initiate 8-week digital capabilities and skills enhancement bootcamp for women’s future of work.

This bootcamp will focus to empower, develop, and employ women and young moms who still pursue their careers, ranging from 24 -30 years old. Most of them live in peri-urban and urban with low to middle income.

• Wendy Pratama, Founder & CEO of lingkaran (Team Lead)
• Ananda Marissya W, Cofounder & COO of lingkaran (Learning & Operational Lead)
• Agi Anyndhita, BDS Manager of lingkaran (Partnership & Community Lead)
• Tamtomo Adi P, Digital Marketing Manager of lingkaran (Marketing Lead)

We have designed and developed many youth development programs for the past 7 years, but we have never developed a program specifically for women yet. Therefore, we'll treat WOMENT as our new application (pilot project) of an existing implemented technology (our website and LMS/CMS).

Innovative Program Journey

We combine several learning methods and tailor them into a hybrid learning experience. We design Digital Learning Contents for online & self-paced learning experiences, we conduct real-live mentoring with experts, and we also develop a project group challenge-based learning and utilize gamification to bring higher engagement.

Technology Implementation

We leverage our existing technology implementation. We already have a website (https://lingkaran.co/) that is utilized as program registration and user database (Customer Management System), and utilize the data for further analysis. We also have developed our own LMS (Learning Management System) and Authoring Tools to deliver a smooth and excellent hybrid learning experience.

Web Program Registration

We utilize our website as a platform to inform about our program details and users can register themselves and purchase the program through our registration system.

Customer Management System

We develop our website back-end as Content and Customer Management System. Not only to manage our front-end website contents, but also act as CRM and user data analytics.

Learning Management System

We have developed our own LMS and embedded it into our website system. We use our LMS for administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and learning delivery functions.

Authoring Tools

We also have developed Authoring Tools to complete the LMS function. Our authoring tools consist of several type of learning contents; article, audio, assignment & quizzes, test, video, image slider, webinar, and survey.

Impact goal:

“In the next 5 years, we want to see more Indonesian women who are empowered, competent in their specific working fields, and have a higher career & financial stability.”

To achieve that higher objective, we'll break it down into Inputs – Outputs – Intermediate Outcomes – Long-term Outcomes.

Inputs:

• Learning curriculum and contents development
• Establish partnerships with mentors, lecturers, communities, etc.
• Campaign and publication production

Outputs:

• Campaign publishing in digital media
• Program launching, registration & curation
• Bootcamp execution and participation (3 batches in 2022)

Intermediate Outcomes:

• Understanding of digital capabilities
• Understanding of digital skills (Digital Marketing / UI/UX Design / Data)
• Apply hands-on experience & create working portfolios

Long-term Outcomes:

• Increased digital capabilities and skills
• Improved employment and economic opportunities
• Increased competency and competitiveness

We have designed and developed many youth development programs, but we have never developed a program specifically for women yet. Therefore, we'll treat WOMENT as our pilot project to be more focused on empowering and developing women in Indonesia.

2022 Impact Goals:

We expect to conduct 3 batches @ 8 weeks, starting in June 2022. We will acquire 2,000 total registrants and curate 600 total participants that hopefully will generate total of 300 working portfolios. And in the end, we will help improve 30% level of employment and economic.

5-years Impact Goals:

Through piloting WOMENT Bootcamp in 2022, replicating and scaling the program within the following years, we hope we can help Indonesian women to be more empowered, competent in their specific working fields, and have a higher career & financial stability.

Through implement WOMENT bootcamp, lingkaran will support SDGs: #4 Quality Education, #5 Gender Equality, and #8 Decent Work for All. 

We are democratizing career development for women and young moms and helping them to be more empowered, developed, and employed at the end of the 8-week bootcamp.

What to measure?

4. Quality Education

• The participation rate of youth and adults in the bootcamp
• Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill
• Parity indices (female/male, rural/urban, bottom/top wealth quintile and others such as disability status, indigenous peoples and conflict-affected, as data become available) for all education indicators on this list that can be disaggregated

5. Gender Equality

• The proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location
• The percentage of women who are empowered, developed, and employed after joining the bootcamp
• The proportion of women in technical, important, and managerial positions

8. Decent Work for All

• The annual growth rate of incomes per women
• The increasement of life quality per women/households
• Average hourly earnings of female and male employees, by occupation, age and persons with disabilities
• Unemployment rate, by sex, age and persons with disabilities

We identified 3 types of potential barriers: Financial, Talent Availability, and Industry Maturity. Those barriers are actually connected one another.

• Financial: since we are bootstrapping with organic growth, we need to balance between our business and impact. To subsidize our public programs, we are also taking clients as our B2B services for our main revenue. And with all of our limitations, it's undeniable that we are still hassle for juggling many things at once.
• Talent Availability: edtech industry is a third-tier industry in terms of talent attractiveness and availability, due to industry maturity and company size. Thus, in operational manner, it's still hard for us to attract and afford high-quality talents to help lingkaran grow faster
• Industry Maturity: the rising of edtech industry has only occurred 3-5 years ago. Of course, K-12 education took first place compared to higher and non-formal education. It, directly and indirectly, affects our own establishment. We still find it difficult to convince investors / VCs, government, high-quality talents, and other stakeholders to join or partner with us.

Looking at the barriers that we identified, we have developed some plans to overcome them.

• Financial: we will continue to strengthen our B2B services while continuously looking for fundraising.
• Talent Availability: we have developed several talent acquisition activities and models, such as attractive employer branding and hiring campaigns, deploying part-time and freelance employment models, conducting internal training to increase existing team capabilities, etc.
• Industry Maturity: as time goes by, we believe edtech industry will emerge and reach its peak. We will implement those 2 plans above to strengthen our business and impact, as well as achieve sustainability.

We currently have 24 people in our team: including 2 co-founders

• 2 Co-founders, act as CEO and COO
• 5 full-time team leaders, act as Content Marketing Lead, Product Marketing Lead, Learning Lead, Business Development & Sales Lead, Product Lead
• 4 full-time staff
• 5 part-time staff
• 8 interns

lingkaran is developed & led by a team with passion for education:

• Wendy Pratama, Founder and CEO

Wendy has experience in education industry for 7+ years. Prior to lingkaran, he was an architect, urban researcher and designer, and have establish several creative businesses; including photography, footwear, and social media agency. He earned his Architecture’s degree from Institute of Technology Bandung. 

• Ananda Marissya Widya, Co-Founder and COO

Ananda has experience in education industry for 6+ years. She worked as Business Analyst, Assistant Store Manager, and established some educational movements. She took her Bachelor’s degree in School of Business and Management, Bandung Institute of Technology and Master's degree, Master in Business Design at Domus Academy, Milan.

• 5 Team Leaders with skills and experiences in Marketing, Learning & Curriculum, Product, and Business Development & Sales

All of our team leaders are experienced 3-6 years in their related fields and are highly passionate about education. We are 

“lingkaran is home of remarkable people from all walks of life.”

We hire exceptional people and help them develop both personally and professionally. We help our team members to grow in their current roles and dream about what's next. We promise to help them complete the circle that maximizes their potential and connects them with their next possibilities.

We have a diverse leadership team, male and female co-founders, different sub-racial backgrounds with 55% female and 45% male composition.

We manifest our diverse, equitable, and inclusive values through our 4 core values:

• We are weirdos.
  Weirdness is part of who we are, and we appreciate us. Every quirk is our chance to contribute to something authentic and significant.
• Curiosity is key.
  lingkaran commits to lifelong learning. We always challenge the status quo and seek new ways of doing things.
• Take a mission and make do.
  lingkaran makes sure each piece of the action makes a difference in other people's life. Our action is data-driven with a spark of empathy.
• Always be relevant.
  lingkaran knows what’s up with industry 4.0. Beyond getting things done, we are sure to focus on the right process but only count the measurable output.

We've partnered and collaborated with amazingly diverse entities. From multinational companies, government institutions, top local companies, emerging startups, to NGOs and grass-root communities.

Currently, we are partnering with:

• Indika Foundation

We partnered up to conduct 3 batches of 1-week freelancer preparation free bootcamp. We managed to acquire 4,300+ registrants and resulting 1,000+ freelancing portfolios submitted.

• Startup4Industry by Ministry of Industry Indonesia

We partnered up with the Ministry of Industry to give 2-months training program for 200+ SMEs to leverage and digitalize their businesses.

And other partnerships with big corporations such as Bank Jago, Telkomsel, Xendit, etc.

We connect our stakeholders into an ecosystem and divide them into 3 categories:

• Beneficiaries

Learners who need to improve their capabilities and enhance skills.

• Enablers

Partners such as mentors, business partners, media partners, and community partners who support us to give more value to beneficiaries and funders.

• Funders

Funders such as companies, startups, brands, NGOs, and governments who support us in funding and financial supports to make this ecosystem sustainable.

• We believe a total pool of $395,000 in prize funding will be beneficial for our beneficiaries and help to improve Indonesian women to be more empowered, competent in their specific working fields, and have a higher career & financial stability.

• We see MIT Solve as a prestigious community and high network platform that could connect us to like-minded organizations and communities globally.

• Not only globally-connected, we believe through this program we can also learn from MITSolve team and other innovators about developing our business, theory of change, and scaling our business. And also enhance our team skills to monitoring and evaluation track to support in building an impact measurement practice.

• We served a higher purpose and try to solve a global and big scale problem. By joining this program and connecting with MITSolve community, we believe we will put Indonesia on the map and increase awareness both of education problems and women inequality issues.