SEED Hybrid Platform

We challenge for Youth Employment. There is an opportunity to create jobs by helping youths to achieve career readiness before they work, engage them in personalized scalable IT-based career enrichment platform, and coach to create enterprises in their native after they have gained certain skills, experiences and confidence.

The problem we are addressing is a global problem of youth development and engagement in the workforce.

Youth are not only future leaders but also everyday leaders. However, youths have no money, less accessible resources and less supportive social environment. Youth are discriminated and untrusted.

Especially in my region, youth are migrating abroad to find jobs. One of the reasons is that there are few job opportunities for youth because there are few businesses creating a vicious cycle for youth and regional development.

Besides, 51% of Myanmar population is less than 27-year, meaning development is crucial, especially for near future.

Low Youth Development - Youth have no money, few reachable resources and less supportive social environment.

1) Youth will be provided 3 months training for strong career readiness - English, computer, interpersonal skills, and office management. There will be loans for those who are not affordable.

2) They will be provided with IT-based career enrichment platform and coaching, with a supportive social environment when they enter the workforce.

3) After 3-5 years of learning in workplace, there will be a course to stimulate entrepreneurship with SEED grants and accelerator program.

4) Empowerment to comeback to native cities and create jobs.

Initial project will take place in Mon State of Myanmar focusing on youths in early 20s, who are about to enter job market. More specifically most of them will be graduated and finding for a suitable job.

As 51% of the country population is of less than 27-year of age, the impact will be very tangible if it is scaled up. Our expectation is to help 100 youths entering job market in the first year of piloting. Based on success, we can scale it up to hundreds to thousand per year. Long term aspiration is for promotion of social entrepreneurship.

* Track the enrollment records in physical place, plus

* Engagements in IT-based Career Enrichment Platform after the training - 100 people will be enrolled and engaged in our SEED Platform of Career Readiness in the first piloting year

* Track down the salaries earned by alumni in general - More than 70% of the alumni will get salary >150 USD per month (which is more than their peers)

* Track down the record of enrollment and engagement,

* And make a survey for their purpose of being engaged in the platform - More than 700 youths in Mon State have been engaged in SEED Hybrid platform for their career readiness, career enrichment and/or education for entrepreneurship stimulation after 3 years

Living in a developing country, I realized that people are very naïve in using technology and only a few people have benefits of it. In fact, Myanmar has over 10 million of Facebook accounts and fallen in the trap of Facebook addiction.

There is an opportunity to transform Facebook to learning management system.

Our platform is trying to create an edge by combining physical place, Facebook, ChatBot, VR Tech and YouTube as an engaging learning management system.

The plan is – to include digital education in physical place, to create learning engagement in Facebook, and then the others for career education.

I have interviewed hundreds of youths who are not engaged in civic life but very active on Facebook. Many youths in Mon State take refuge of Facebook to escape their reality.

Our platform is not about forcing disengaged youths to be back in their reality. We are inducing them to learn living real life, using technology.

Of course digital platform only is not the one thing to create a sense of being cared. We are also trying to create a real-life social network of peers who are successful in their career life so that youth will be engaged again.

Facebook, ChatBots and YouTube are quite accessible to those who have mobile phones (commonest being Androids). The number of Facebook accounts is around 1/5th of Myanmar population. Thus, this is very accessible, especially with free packages offered from different operators.

People just have to install three very popular apps (in fact, all of them have been pre-installed) – Facebook, Messenger and YouTube.

There will be a group to learn career enrichment, a Facebook page newsletter, a ChatBot for referencing, VR Tech for career education and a YouTube channel for learning certain videos. Some will be free, and some will be charged.

There are two revenue streams for sustainability.

Firstly, that those who can afford the training can give cash (300 USD in total) and then those who are not affordable can apply for either educational loans or a micro-scholarship. For micro-scholarship, we will ask the participant to give only 15% of their salaries back to the platform for 10 months (i.e. about 200 USD), learn from the platform and also ask for promise to attend the accelerator program and create businesses back in Mon State after 3-4 years, with equity funding for winning ideas. Even with paid type, this is a very affordable training considering 300 USD for a total of 3 Months and people can pay in chunks.

The second stream is that those who have not attended SEED platform can learn certain contents by paying a fee. It will be like Online Courses for career readiness/enhancement.

* Tricky registration framework- no social enterprise entity. We can choose between a business or an NGO (to apply for funding). We can also have both entities but the process will be more complicated.

* Because there are fewer enterprises locally, there will be migration of alumni. This will be good when they come back and create jobs but, in a short-term, this can be misunderstood by local organizations.

* The curriculum is now in sketched stage- has to be further developed by continuing Design Thinking.

* No experience with using VR Tech for educational purpose.

I am applying to SOLVE because of three expectations:

1. Learning: To see what other people are doing so that my innovative repertoire will be widened. It would be great if someone pointed out me the opportunity to be improved as well.

2. Funding: To support my innovative solution, it would be great if I can have some funding from SOLVE.

3. Partnership: Though my proposed solution is a combination of human and technology, I still need tech skills to be improved, especially for VR Tech. If I can find any partner from SOLVE, that would be great.

Impact Hub Yangon will be our innovation partner. Also possible for future innovation accelerator program.

National Enlightenment Institute would be training partner.

There are other individual professionals for our training programs as well.

Center for Vocational Training, Youth Mentoring Programs, Possibly NEI