Digna- Thriving Communities

Digna envisions the power and knowledge of marginalized and under resourced youth in Brazil as a way to create income generation and financial opportunities most for lgbt+ people, especially black, woman/trans people, indigenous and immigrant communities by  providing a complete marketplace where you can find their knowledge, products and services localized by your city, what your looking for and your interests, creating a creative and circular economy. We are also a place where this youth can access courses and skills building contents  to acess jobs most on the creative and technology area  by connecting them with enterprises ang organizations by a talent bank. Our solution is a way to trackling the growing problem of digital gap and worthy opportunitites for youth most for those who experience structural barriers on access job opportunities and who has a simmilar context in most of the countries of the globall south as Latin America. 

Worthy is working to create not only income-generating opportunities and productive inclusion of black youth and the LGBT+ community, but also to break the cycle of digital exclusion that negatively impacts this population. Brazil, in addition to being the country in which LGBT+ people are most murdered in the world, stands out negatively for not ensuring that this population, which exceeds 20 million people and represent 20% of the total, does not have access to minimum resources of citizenship, as initiatives that guarantee access to education and employment, resulting, for example, in a reality in which more than 90% of Trans people depend exclusively on prostitution for their livelihood, only Brazil where we were born, 46% of the youth is unemployed, affecting primarily to black people where among the lgbt+ population, trans people and transvestites are 90% in prosti tution for not having a choice with immigrant people who cannot access the formal labor market, this same scenario is repeated in most of the world, especially in countries like the United States, where the black population is underrepresented, where 10% of the youth facing unemployment.

Using the potential of communication and internet technologies, DIGNA - Diverse Communities was created, the first employability, entrepreneurship and income generation platform for black and LGBT+ youth in the country, we are amarketplace where they can sell their products, services and knowledge  from their own micro-enterprises and also from a platform connecting young talents to the formal job market, especially in the creative and technology sector, where they can create a professional curriculum/portfolio for free which can be downloaded and automatically be part of our talent bank connecting with companies that align with diversity and inclusion, listed by fortune as the 500 largest companies in the world, aimed at promoting diversity and economic inclusion and productive of this collective to professional opportunities and economic autonomy, we will create a marketplace of talents, services and products, generating income and value chains in the community as we generate inclusion in pro-diversity companies.

Our solution directly serves the youth most affected by inequalities in access to technologies and opportunities in the digital environment, as well as structural barriers to access education and opportunities, such as black youth and LGBT+, especially women, trans people, immigrants and local communities such as indigenous people, We were born because we understand the pain that we ourselves face when accessing jobs, facing barriers such as access to education, employment and that can be resolved with the creation of new economic opportunities like the one we want to create through Digna, where they can generate income from of their knowledge, products and skills and where they will also have support through a micro-fund for their projects, those who do not want to undertake can train in the technological and creative area and connect with partner companies through a talent bank.

Black and LGBT+ youth are above all more historically affected by exclusion and lack of access to economic and educational opportunities that inevitably transfer to the digital age, as a way to reduce these gaps in access and use of technologies we are building Digna, our mission is in addition to working for the productive inclusion of this collective to professional opportunities in the creative and technology sector with a plataform that teach the hard and softskills to this group, as a tool to creation of new value chains beyond the formal market, through its own marketplace with products and services, generating benefits in the community from the use of digital technologies 

We are a social impact start-up, we are at the stage of building our technological solution which will be a platform where people can access this content and also create a cv/portfolio who will be automatically added to our talent pool, we where born in 2017 and already with a successful trajectory, we have already developed a mvp that ran in partnership with an LGBT+ NGO called TODXS and we connected 5 people to the market with the seed capital we received, this year we will launch our platform on a national scale, in Brazil, and our plan is that in 12 months we will be the experience necessary to operating in countries like Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile too.

The innovation in the use of digital technologies proposed by Digna is mainly in providing a safe space and visibility to products, services and knowledge of marginalized communities such as black, LGBT bodies, women and indigenous and immigrant people through a marketplace and a talent bank of connection to companies, in addition to leveraging the economic recovery of our society, based on the entrepreneurial shift and economic potential in the community, acting actively in the face of problems such as economic and productive inclusion and income generation for the most vulnerable and directly affected communities by the pandemic. The potential of digital technologies to face the effects caused by the pandemic, in addition to the long-term impact of initiating and providing opportunities for an entrepreneurial journey and from the 12 months of the platform's execution, the creation of a support fund for micro-enterprises, helping to establish itself and their businesses and to be a means of propulsion these powers

Our core technology is the creation of a plataform who will can be used in smartphones as an app but also in desktop as a site, that will use tecnology as a big data, and IA in the marketplace to help our users access and find their interessed things, working in suggestions, local areas and neigbhorhood, creating a experience to buy and help their community and for our plataform users as a talent bank who will be people subscribing to the talent bank and enterprises looking for talents a Bot who will help ours users creating a CV and for Enterprises a IA who will help filtrate and organize the profiles of candidates.

Our solution is based in a new use of a methodology/techonoly wo is widely know by the market that are the marketplaces, our difference is that we bust the power of a community who have the power of buiyng in millions to drive financiaal inclusion and prosperity for his own people.

No. we have to be carrefoul just with the labor laws in connceting people with professional services who will be mediated by our plataform but trully informed for ours clients and for ours users providing services/prodcuts also. 

As a pilot we are running tests to serve at least 50 people. In one year with clientss and plataforms users we estimate 10.000 and in five years we will be having access from more than 50.000 clients and a pool of 5.000 entrepreneus just in the marketplace, using ours plataform to study&connect with jobs will be 25.000 having more than 200 enterprises partners. 

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Vitoria, who is our founder and CEO is a youth activist black trans person with a joruney developing solutions to the problems that affected youth in Brazil, she is a social entrepreneur and innovator who are part of Global Shpaers Community, and have participated in the most important programs for young leaders national and globally as a Fellow at Programa ProLíder and a Women Deliver Young Leader. Her team is composed of others womans with professional experience in technology and innnovation sector, as a Violeta Monteiro who is a Feminist activist and Software Developer and Carla Pinheiro who is a Creative and UX Design 

Diversity and Inclusion is the core of Digna, we are born as a plataform to drive diversity and the productive inclusion and safe and dignity space for youth in the labour market, partnering with enterprises to generate inclusion but also creating paralel aternative economies were we create formal jobs and drive entrepreneurial action, this diversity is also embodied in our own team creating a solution that serves better our community who are millions in almost every country in LATAM because is created for persons who are dailly affected by this problems 

We are applying to the TPrize challenge because the work that we are warrior-building here matchs perfectly with the goals of the challange and we belive that integrating this network as a team we will be not for the funding opportunity an especial occasion to work hard on our product refine ours goals and solutions to serve better our people, we know that we are not in the ideal stage but we trully belive that be in this program can take us to the forefront of impact where we want and will deliver our solution, that is America Latina, not just for the similar problems but also for the impact goal.

With the funding, we were able to refine the development of our platform to run on a national level and thus test our solution running for thousands of people and performing large financial volumes, this would allow us to replicate our platform in other countries and execute integration strategies with users and partnerships in the countries where we will be operating. In addition to establishing the right partnerships that led us to success during the implementation, as partners that help us to format the necessary training for our micro-entrepreneurs, besides a part of the resource being made available for the creation of the support fund for our users' projects.