Young people between the ages 15 and 24 constitute around 20 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population, thus making it the youngest continent in the world (African Union, 2019). Even though this trend is a huge opportunity for increased productivity and innovation, it also poses a huge risk if education, training and employment are not widely available in the region.
The risk is heightened as currently the vast majority of Africa’s youth work informally, with many underemployed or remaining in poverty despite being employed as a result of low wages and the lack of a social safety net.
Waape, a startup based in Uganda is trying to tackle the problem of unemployment and underemployment in Africa with the use of cutting edge technology. For this Startup Spotlight, we caught up with Collins Mbulakyalo, one of the Founders and Ops Lead at Waape to dive deeper into how they are making the African job market more accessible and equitable. Enjoy!
Startup Name: Waape
Industry: Talent, Marketplaces, HR & Staffing
Location: Kampala, Uganda
Date founded: June 2020
Number of employees: 21
Vonage API used: Verify, SMS
We are building Africa's Digital Talent Marketplace to make hiring underrepresented African freelancers more accessible for startups and SMEs.
280 Million of Africa’s Youth are either unemployed or underemployed and at the same time, 89% of startups never make it past the first year. This is the same problem we’ve been solving since we started, the only thing that’s changed is the approach we’ve taken to solve it, from starting out initially as a Talent Agency to becoming a Marketplace.
Our product is built on top of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the core with a blind matching algorithm, we do this to make sure opportunities are curated for all equitably and made as easily accessible. But above all, we use a lot of cutting edge technology to build our product with the goal of helping businesses find their match within less than an hour of posting a job.
Bootstrap
While starting out we had to run training cohorts with the talent on our platform and because we started out during the heart of the pandemic, we were unable to run training sessions physically for a greater part of our first 4 months. We later then figured out a platform we could use to run training and even issue certifications remotely and ended up using that.
We initially started out our marketplace model with a focus on freelancers rather than balancing effort on both employers and freelancers and we eventually ended up with the chicken and egg problem of marketplaces. We learnt about how important it is to be intentional about balancing both ends when it comes to customer acquisition and sales.
Elon Musk, his diverse portfolio of companies and his unconventional methods that got him growth are rather interesting. It's because of this that we’d greatly benefit from him, because he is building companies for the future and understands what it means to go rock bottom and rise up, which is greatly inspiring.
We’ve been using Vonage’s APIs to verify our user phone numbers and send product SMS notifications via our platform for things like new jobs, job status updates, payment completions amongst other things.
We currently have a pool of 500 users with 400 of those being freelancers and 100 employers and have helped 70 businesses find the right talent they need to scale their business since then.
In the next 3 years, we want to have created 100,000 job opportunities and expanded to cities like Lagos, Nairobi and Kigali. We truly want to live up to the term Africa’s Digital Talent Marketplace.
At Vonage for Startups, we help early-stage startups better understand Communications APIs' power and enable them to utilise these tools better. We provide the necessary educational resources and a supportive environment for the startup community to benefit from Communications APIs, whatever their individual needs are.
**
Apply to join us here.**
){kind=small}
