Beyond Rubies

Across developing nations, females are unfairly marginalised from accessing formal and informal education. Of the females who eventually access education, many are exploited as they seek employment. 

Our community is focused on providing females from underdeveloped countries with mentors, educational resources/opportunities and access to exploitation-free career opportunities.

We deliver weekly inspirational/educational content on developmental focused topics such as STEM, employability, entrepreneurship and digital literacy. Our focus is on building a community that is focused on supporting females within ages 13 - 30 through their career journey.

We understand not all women living within our target regions have access to the internet and platforms we use, the Beyond Rubies Circle (small groups) focuses on deepening our reach by utilising local and trained Beyond Rubies ambassadors (21 - 30) that have gone through our mentoring programs.

MIT Solve can help scale this initiative through provision of key tools, resources, grants and expertise.

Women still account for just 39.9% of the global labor force (World Bank, 2019). One of the determinants of labor market outcomes is educational attainment. 

The most uneducated women in poorer countries are the most likely to participate in invisible activities (eg. domestic labor) and informal employment that lack security and are not covered by labor laws (Datta, 2017). 

The problem we are trying to solve is the lack of educational and employability opportunities available for women in underdeveloped countries. It is critical to focus on the quality of the jobs women can access and ensure women can fairly take up paid employment without any form of exploitation through the process. 

Our vision is a world where women are provided the same opportunities as men. Over the next decade, we would like to increase the number of women with formal education across diverse sectors and enable fair access to employment in underdeveloped nations.

We employ a range of platforms such as our website, futuristic app, Youtube, podcasts, events just to mention a few to deliver our educational and inspirational content targeted at females in third world countries. 

The Beyond Rubies(BR) Circle enables us to deepen our reach. Our aim is to have a few Beyond Rubies ambassadors within target regions who work closely with females in their region to deliver our empowerment mandate. 

BR ambassadors are trained virtually through our tailored curriculum that equips them with the knowledge needed to lead the BR Circle locally. Our ambassadors will also continue to benefit from the BR mentoring scheme. The BR Circle will serve as a local arm of the wider BR community where members support each other and continue to motivate each other to stay in school.

The BR mentoring scheme will be delivered using our website and App to ensure the safety of all our stakeholders throughout the process.

The BR Bootcamp and fellowship implements an innovative 3-year work readiness programme to close attainment gaps and broaden access to the most prestigious industries and universities for females. Our solution is focused on providing a one-stop shop for female empowerment across third world countries.

Beyond Rubies target population are females from third world countries aged 13 - 30.

Two-thirds of the 750 million illiterate people in the world are female (The SDG Report 2019) and more than 29 million out-of-school children are girls which highlights the gap in educational attainment for females in these countries. We train females within our target audience through virtual mentoring, bootcamps and fellowship, webinars, workshops, seminars and the Beyond Rubies Circle. 

Beyond Rubies employs an empowerHER mandate that seeks to inspireHER, educateHER and investinHER which integrates our approach towards proactive engagement delivered through our technology enabled platform. 

Our solutions will impact lives by;

Equipping females through formal and informal educational opportunities across diverse sectors including STEM courses and ultimately help them launch successful careers. 

Our community seeks to create a give-back cycle where the alumni community become mentors/role-models while deepening our partnerships with employers they have built relationships with over the course of their careers.

Our mentoring scheme will be delivered through a combination of virtual and in-person meetings. This virtual mentoring platform will enable females from underdeveloped countries access mentors from a global scale.

Majority of our target audience are culturally not encouraged to obtain formal and informal education, and therefore lack access to career opportunities.

Our mentoring platform, up-skill plan/events, work readiness programme and Beyond Rubies (BR) Circle aims at increasing female participation in formal and informal education while providing a fair transition into employment for females from developing countries. 

Our solution seeks to break social barriers that have limited women within our target audience from maximising their potentials. We partner with organisations who are interested in female empowerment to create fair career opportunities for them. 

Current competitors are She Leads Africa (SLA) and The Female Lead. SLA focuses on highlighting achievements of female leaders through content publication and events designed to give a voice to women. The Female Lead is a charity dedicated to showing how women shape the world.

At Beyond Rubies, we dare to shine light on all opportunities for females. Our solution is different because we are cutting across geographies and not focused on a particular region, but on underdeveloped countries using technology. Our solution is also unique in its use of local small groups (BR Circle) to reach the unreachable (females without access to technology and young girls in secondary schools). The BR Circle enables females to pass on the torch locally and support other women climb up their career ladder.

Our solution is also unique in the way it connects women within our target audience to a diverse pool of mentors without any racial or ethnic barrier. We are keen on global unity, our approach to mentorship is to connect females to a mentor who they can access, communicate with and learn from.

We are building a community that will be relevant to women at various phases. The Beyond Rubies Bootcamp and fellowship implements an innovative 3-year work readiness programme to close attainment gaps and broaden access to the most prestigious industries and universities for females. Our model delivers impact to young females while also providing career support to females who are of employable age and seeking employment.

The core technology that powers our solution are our website, mobile app, youtube, and other social media platforms. We deliver training using Zoom and other live conferencing services. 

The Beyond Rubies Mentoring initiative allows mentors and mentees to be matched automatically through a standard algorithm that captures data relevant to individuals. Our system algorithm will ensure mentors are not selected based on race or ethnicity as we seek a diverse form of mentoring that allows matching regardless of race. Our approach to mentoring will be clearly disclosed to all our users. We seek to deliver our mentoring virtually using our website and mobile app.

Our website and mobile app will also serve as a first point of contact for information and awareness of events, blogs, educational content and registration for collaborating with small or medium sized enterprises. 

We have tested the use of our website for delivering content, blogs, videos and podcasts to our community. We have continued to grow the number of subscribers interested in our content and who have reached out to us for support on their journey. 

The use of social media such as Instagram highlights our successful launch of the educateHER plan. Our engagement on Instagram has been significantly useful in growing our network, We now host weekly Instagram live sessions that keep our followers engaged.

We share our blog posts on Instagram to further drive readership of all our content on our websites. Instagram and Youtube enable us to capture useful feedback from people in our community and it helps us understand some of their needs and how we can tailor our curriculum to benefit them. 

We continue to develop our website as we seek to integrate a mentoring portal into the current website. We also want to launch an app to give mentors and mentees access to continuous and convenient conversations that are safe and protect the privacy of both parties. 

We are already ‘up-skilling’ hundreds of females through our content and we recently launched a virtual CV clinic delivered through our website that is focused on supporting females within our target on securing employment.

According to the research by UN Women, almost 70% of employed women in South Asia undertake hard labour, as do more than 60% of employed women in sub-Saharan Africa. This highlights the importance of developing policies and programmes that address their needs, interests and constraints. 

More rural women experience domestic violence, and yet few seek support services. In Peru, less than 5% of the total amount of rural domestic violence survivors (60%) sought help, compared to approximately 16% of urban women. Many women are abused in the workplace and Beyond Rubies’ solution will ensure policies are in place to support women with every employment partnership made. 

Recently, there has been numerous cases of rape of university students in Nigeria that have made headlines. These are some of the challenges women face in developing countries as they make efforts to access reputable careers and other life opportunities.

Partnering with local and international employers on fair terms for employment removes some of the biggest challenges women face in their pursuit for career advancement. Being employed through our Beyond Rubies solution, we aim to protect women's rights in the workplace and put in place policies that seek to eliminate abuse of women across our target regions.

About 80% of our community are from underdeveloped countries, 70% of them are interested in education to secure employment. Some of the common themes highlighted through our interactions within our community show that cultural norms, financial constraints and lack of mentoring has stifled their ability to have successful careers. 

While progress has been made in reducing the gender gap in urban school enrollment, data from 42 countries shows that rural girls are twice as likely as urban girls to be out of school. We understand the slow pace of technological advancement in rural regions, so to solve this challenge, the BR Circle has been developed to deliver our educational contents while placing mentors through the initiative.

Research has shown that mentoring is an unsung hero in the field of development. Its potential is huge and with careful planning and support, it can be impressively effective. 

We currently serve 20,000 females that are part of the Beyond Rubies Community from underdeveloped countries. These are some of the untapped resources needed to transform these communities and through our current offerings, we have been able to successfully deliver inspiring and educational content to the. We are certain our brand will be serving a total of 50,000 females from our target audience over the next year.

As part of our business growth plan, we will have grown our community to over 600,000 females in five years and expect that they benefit from our community through the Beyond Rubies Circle, educational/inspirational content & BR Fellowship which includes the innovative 3-year work readiness programme.

Over the next year, our goal is to grow our community to 50K followers across all our platforms. 

We plan to grow our network by consistently providing tailored content targeted at meeting the needs of our audiences. We will ensure our articles, newsletters, podcasts and videos are relatable and life transforming. The stories we share and educational content we produce will continue to inspire and motivate young females to stay in formal education, grow and improve their careers.

We plan to increase our following by 150K on a yearly basis over the next 4 years using social media ads, participating in social innovation competitions that will create visibility for the work we do and through word of mouth recommendations from the people within our community.

The Beyond Rubies ambassadors are crucial in growing our community and deepening our reach beyond the numbers that will be captured on our social media platforms. 

We will “up-skill” millions of females in underdeveloped countries to fill stable jobs that transform their incomes thereby driving scalable, replicable and sustainable impact.

Through corporate sponsorships, Beyond Rubies will organise events that are transformational for our target audience to further deepen our reach and grow our network.

One of our current barriers is lack of capital to strategically distribute our content and plan life transforming events to tackle the career challenges females in our target countries face. Beyond Rubies is currently being funded by the founder who is bootstrapping. 

Another barrier that currently exists for Beyond Rubies is cultural barriers. We seek to build key relationships within our target countries using our social media community and partnerships. Our model is not focused on race or country, it is targeted at a diverse pool of females from diverse countries. Understanding how the talent market across these geographies operate is crucial for our success. We also need to navigate all the legal requirements across the regions we seek to reach to ensure we continue to do the right thing as an organisation. We have been working closely with legal advisors who are knowledgeable in some of these regions and will continue to do this as we expand our reach.

Our website is currently not robust enough to deliver the mentoring portal we seek to execute through it. We plan to continue to develop the website until all the features required are fully functional. In the next five years, we aim to have the Beyond Rubies mentoring app set up to integrate our virtual offerings. 

One of our current barriers is lack of capital to finance our content and plan our life transforming events required to tackle the career challenges females in our target countries face. Beyond Rubies is currently being funded by the founder who is currently bootstrapping. We intend to raise finance from donors & philanthropists who are interested in the work we do. We will also seek grants , opportunities and investments. 

Our website is currently not robust enough to deliver the mentoring portal we seek to deliver through it. We plan to continue to develop the website until all the features required are fully functional. Our fundraising efforts will benefit the website and BR app development.

Another barrier that currently exists for Beyond Rubies are cultural barriers. We seek to build key relationships within our target countries using our social media community and partnerships. The Beyond Rubies ambassadors will also be strategically selected to ensure we benefit from their understanding of the regions within our reach. We will work closely with local organisations within these geographies to deepen our understanding of their talent market and how females are positioned within it.

To tackle our legal barriers, we have been working closely with legal advisors who are knowledgeable of the laws within some of the regions within our reach and we will continue to do this as we grow. 

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There are 5 part-time staffs currently working on Beyond Rubies solution.

Modupeola Samuel(founder) was born and raised in a lower middle class family in an underdeveloped country, and had to overcome her family's financial challenges to graduate with a first class in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Greenwich. She is an ICAEW Chartered Accountant and works as a Risk Advisor for one of the big financial services firms in London. She experienced the negative impacts of not having positive role models growing up. She has also been a victim of attempted sexual exploitation through a recruitment process in an underdeveloped country. Beyond Rubies was founded to ensure other females in these countries have access to education and exploit-free career opportunities.

Olamide Adeyemo is extremely passionate about social enterprises that champion a growth mindset whilst helping young people thrive in society. He has successfully delivered financial education projects for young people in order to improve their financial capability and confidence.

Dolapo Salawu is an investment professional who was raised by his mother. Having seen her struggles as a single parent, Dolapo's passion for female empowerment was born. Dolapo believes that every human has the ability to be their best selves if granted access to equal opportunities.

Kam Rai is actively involved in building ventures that solve societal problems. She regularly undertakes consulting work for a few educational social enterprises. She is a mentor for the Hatch Enterprise BAME Female Founders Program where she advises women of colour on how to execute business ideas. 

We are currently working on partnerships with schools across our target region.

Key stakeholders: 

- Corporate organisations for work placements 

- schools to deliver talks, host BR circle, workshops and other inspirational and motivational contents 

- Philanthropists and donors 

Cost structure :

- Cost associated with maintaining technology infrastructure (website, app , podcast), creating & distributing educational/inspirational content and funding challenges/prize competitions to keep our community engaged, challenged and motivated.

Impact measure:

We will “up-skill” millions of females aged 13-30 across underdeveloped countries to fill stable jobs that transform their incomes thereby driving scalable, replicable and sustainable impact and converting the female populace from demographic liabilities to “demographic dividends”

Ultimately, our simple training and job placement model has the potential to restore dignity and enhance livelihoods for millions of females in underdeveloped countries thereby restoring and empowering them to contribute to economic activities in a meaningful way.

By 2025, BR aims to train an average of 200,000 females annually to reach their true potential and support them through the process of securing stable jobs.

Surplus:

Any profit will be reinvented into the Beyond Rubies.

After 2025, we will launch Beyond Rubies investinHER scheme to support females who require financial and business advisory services to launch business ventures.

Value proposition/Revenue: 

- philanthropists who are passionate about female empowerment.

- placing females in safe and secure employment where they can deliver quality work without the risk of being exploited.

- Advertisement revenue, revenue from events hosted for Beyond Rubies wider community.

- Sales of merchandise at Beyond Rubies events.

Sustained Donations and grants: Beyond Rubies will approach organisations whose CSR mandates align with what we do. We will apply for grants to finance our growth plans.

As we grow, we will leverage on our brand name to host events to benefit our wider BR community (including mentors, alumni and other females who may be interested). Some of these events will be paid for and the profits made will be used to fund our impact projects

At our mentors events, we will sell Beyond Rubies Merchandise and reinvest the profits into our impact projects.

For every female that is successfully placed into reputable employment through our service, we will charge a fee once the placement offer is in place. 

We will also raise funding through brand sponsorships and partnerships.

We are looking forward to joining the solve community to benefit from the access to peers, funders and experts through the Solve's nine-month program. 

Having expert review of the Beyond Rubies impact model and providing expertise and advice will enable us achieve the scale of impact we aspire to attain.

Beyond Rubies will benefit from mentorship, strategic advice and exposure the Solve program offers as we seek to deepen our reach and impact across the underdeveloped world. 

The Solve program will also open doors to funding and grants to help us develop the infrastructure we need to deliver our solution across underdeveloped countries.

We seek to partner with organisations across diverse sectors globally and locally (countries within our reach)

- Financial services 

- Engineering 

- Technology

- Investment Banking 

- Law 

- Startups

- Social Ventures and NGO's

- Secondary Schools and Universities; to jointly deliver impact focused events and develop curriculums that allow more females access education

- Corporate Organisations; for job placement and advertisements as well as access to staff pool to drive forward the Beyond Rubies Mentoring scheme.

- Local government; to develop policies that support female empowerment that cuts across education and access to education.

Beyond Rubies is a community that seeks to inspire females across underdeveloped countries to pursue formal and informal education while also supporting them through the work readiness process. 

We use our website and other platforms such as Youtube, to distribute our content. The Beyond Rubies Circle deepens our reach into remote areas within our target countries/regions where females do not have access to technology. 

Our solution seeks to improve the quality of lives of women living in third world countries through 'up-skilling' opportunities (mentoring, training courses, webinars and seminars) and also the work readiness support we offer to ensure they are successful at securing reputable employment. 

The prize will enable us to develop more content and successfully distribute them to our target audience. It will also enable us to plan and successfully deliver inspirational events to them.

The prize will enable us to continue developing our website and mobile app to include a secure mentoring platform for secure communication between mentors and mentee. Our portal will ensure confidentiality, professionalism and security are in place for both parties.

Beyond Rubies is a community that seeks to inspire females across underdeveloped countries to pursue formal and informal education while also supporting them through employment placement. 

We use our website and other platforms such as Youtube, to distribute our content. We developed the Beyond Rubies Circle to deepen our reach into regions where some of our target audience do not have access to technology. Beyond Rubies ambassadors who will be carefully selected will get trained virtually through our curriculum to gain the right level of expertise to deliver our specialised training locally within our target regions. 

Our mentors pool will be open to a diverse calibre of females who are passionate about supporting females from underdeveloped countries through their career journey. We will continue to host events targeted at both our mentors (clients and stakeholders) and mentees (beneficiaries).

Our solution seeks to improve the quality of lives of women living in third world countries through 'up-skilling' opportunities (mentoring, training courses, webinars and seminars/workshops) while supporting them through the process of securing reputable employment. 

The prize will enable us to develop our content and distribute them effectively to our target audience. It will also enable us to plan and successfully organise and deliver inspirational events for our target audience.

The prize will also enable us to continue developing a quality and professional website which will include the secure mentoring platform that seeks to provide females in these regions access to a global pool of mentors who are passionate about supporting them through their journey.