SoHo Werk

SoHo Werk helps bridge the gender digital divide by providing physical & online training to young girls & women in frontier technologies and linking them to freelance employment.

Girls and Women are able to create a profile on the platform and select their skills. This enables them to apply for jobs online that meet their qualifications. They are also able to access free training materials in their domain to ensure they meet global / international standards. By working with training providers who provide free learning materials, we are able to provide high quality learning materials for frontier technologies which are in high demand. 

Through our incubation program we encourage them to form companies and bid for contracts in government, Non profits & private companies.

 Our solution would create millions of jobs if scaled globally. 

Girls and women often have less access to technology and the internet compared to boys and men. In sub saharan Africa, girls and women struggle to afford technology and internet access. Stereotypes around technology being ‘for boys’ and fear of being discriminated against stop girls from using digital tools.

Girls are 5 times less likely to consider a career in tech than boys, Many girls and women lack adequate skills in ICT, female graduates who study Computer Science don’t pursue careers in ICT or drop out to pursue other careers,  Women own less than 10% of the digital startups in Sub Saharan Africa,  Less than 20% of females attend ICT events such as hackathons, networking seminars and conferences.

Existing freelance marketplaces discriminate against women and minorities. 

Existing freelance marketplaces are still designed around a “traditional” workflow. Real-world labor discrimination is an important and difficult problem that has been studied for many years. Studies have showed that the design of websites may exacerbate preexisting social biases.  Other studies

show that men are assumed to be more worthy than women. Recently, researchers have begun looking at the potential harms (such as gender and racial discrimination) posed by opaque, algorithmic systems.

SoHo Werk is an online platform where girls and women can create a profile and access digital learning materials to upskill. They can apply for jobs posted on the platform by a large section of employers. 

We focus on training employable and in demand digital skills. We plan to support women not just as users of technology but developers and creators of technology. 

A modern training center will be equipped with a state of the art computer laboratory, and a makerspace. The Marker space is a place for ambitious start-ups, DIYers and creatives. It offers a place to realize ideas and innovations in the form of prototypes and small batch production. 3D printers, drones, Augmented reality displays, Blockchain and Internet of Things experiments can be carried out. The MakerSpace will provide training and consulting services as well as events for our female members with any level of knowledge, providing them with support and networking options.

We shall all support girls and women to set up digital enterprises and lobby government agencies and non profits to provide affirmative action in contracting to enable them win tenders and contracts. 

Our target population includes girls and women from the age of 14  to 30.  They are usually unprivileged girls/ women who are drawn both from the informal sector and formal sector, who are not  able to buy computers or get internet access to enable them study online.  Without formal skills they are unable to earn income or compete favorably in the marketplace. We have set up social media platforms and had interactive design sprints and group sessions with them in order to understand their needs and challenges. By engaging and partnering with feminist organizations that provide support to girls and women we are able to understand their needs better.

Our solution will address their needs by giving them training in demand skills, linking them to employment and help them achieve their life long dreams of a good paying career in one of the most lucrative job markets anywhere on the planet. 

Our strategy of combining both physical and online education enables us to achieve scale by training more girls and women in digital skills that are in demand. Using human centered design principles and agile methodologies we apply people processes technological schema that ensures we get product fit by training girls and women in frontier technologies that are in demand, this helps us to achieve present short term and long term goals. The online freelance marketplace platform gives the girls and women to apply their training in the real world while earning an income. 

Freelance marketplaces have existed however we have added a training component. We are also actively engaging employers, government, non profits and private sector to use our platform for hiring instead of using the traditional approaches of using newspapers. 

Our solution is multi lingual and accessible to users with disabilities (Visual and hearing disabilities), this means girls and women with disabilities are able to participate in our online training and online freelance marketplace. 

They are many freelance marketplaces such as upwork  but their model  targets the USA market. Its dominated by freelancers from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan and China. Our main focus is freelance jobs within the African countries that are currently hired out in an informal way. In African many countries have freelance platforms but none of them has a solid footing, because most of these companies do not apply the correct strategy. We have many freelancers, but very few of them have the desired skills to produce quality work, so without address the quality of freelancers, employers will hire once but not return. 

Our strategy is to upskill the freelancers to an international standard and market them. Even a unicorn like Andela quickly pulled out of many countries, because of a flawed and expensive model they employed. Higher education is expensive and many parents pay for it, but the children fail to get jobs, by focusing on indemand training and jobs we provide a unique offering which is very hard to resist.

Our Technology involves a web application, and mobile application for Android and iOs. 

Our Modern computer laboratory and marker space has 3D printers, drones, equipment for Augmented and Virtual reality.

Our training courses range from blockchain, artificial intelligence, gaming and animation on top of the traditional computer science, business and creating writing courses. 

The Intuit 2020 Report estimated that 80% of large corporations plan to increase the use of freelancers in the coming years. Accenture also pointed out that 20% of Fortune 500 companies are already using Upwork (likely more if you count other platforms) to prepare themselves for the workforce transformation.

The trend is well-supported by the increasing number of freelance platforms and services targeting enterprise clients in the past few years, such as the launches of Upwork Enterprise and Upwork Pro in 2016. These services were born for an obvious reason — enterprise clients pay more. A lot more.

In Upwork’s case, 10% of its $121.9 million revenue in the first half of 2018 came from a single client — a budget only obtainable by enterprise clients.

Whereas SMBs hire freelancers for a variety of reasons, enterprise companies typically hire freelancers for one-off or experimental projects that require highly-specialized skills. They are happy to pay high rates if the freelancers are top-notch. If you consider the time, resources, opportunity cost, and associated risks it involves to hire a senior full-time employee at a large company, a $150–300 hourly rate is like pocket change in comparison.

Our theory of change involves educating, lobbying governement institutions, private companies and non profits about the need for affirmative action for female owned enterprises and hiring female workers in the workspace.

We also breakdown barriers and stereotypes that prevent girls and women from pursuing technology and STEM courses.

We also encourage parents of girls with disabilities to take them to school or our programs, since the society sees them as not able to create value, and yet they can live fullfilled lives, achieve and soar to great heights beyond their wildest of imaginations. 

We encourage companies to use our freelance marketplace to hire talent rather than rely on the traditional, informal changes which are time consuming and more expensive in the long run, with several disputes that can arise. Freelancers can also take a leap of faith knowing they will be paid since funds are escrowed prior to project start. It's a paradigm shift and also in the long run freelancers can apply for international contracts on other freelance platforms since they will have a track record on our platform. Its very difficult for new freelancers to obtain a contract on established platforms since algorithms will favor users with a profile and the discrimination bias will kick in. 

Existing training providers will be encouraged to digitize their learning materials and provide them freely or a very low costs, and they can gain thousands of students using this model which we are championing. Learning has been for the most part been traditional.

Opportunities exist for young girls and women but they have not been harnessed due to existing solutions that fail to understand the correct path to success.

We currently have 1,000 users on our platform

In the next year we expect to scale to at least one more country within East Africa and scale across the African continent within the next five years.

The main barrier is access to implementing partners who can post jobs on the platform. As long as we have enough jobs on the platform we shall be able to attract freelancers. We also need financing to curate high quality learning materials and also link up with training institutions. We need funding to be able to host the large file sizes associated with video training. High costs of Internet and computers also make it a barrier for girls and women to access digital technologies especially in rural areas. 

We have started partnering with telecommunication providers to zero rate our web platform to allow users without a paid internet subscription to access the learning materials at no cost. We are also partnering with universities to enable us access their learning materials at no fee.

7 Full time

4 part time 

5 Contractors

We are a diverse team with a broad range of expertise. Our team members are drawn from Academia,Government and the Non profit sectors. Our product is developed in house which enables us to lower our development costs. Some of our highly skilled technical staff have worked in Europe, Asia and North America enabling us to develop a truly world class application while following industry best practices. Some team members have experience working as freelancers and also experience hiring freelancers, which enables us to know the lay of the land. 

Training is also something that comes naturally to some of our key founding members who know the challenges women face learning technology and also the opportunities, this unique blend makes a great fit to produce a unique product that will solve a global challenge.

We are currently partnering with Bernice Women which is a feminist organization that helps us with focus groups, design sprints and identifying and trainin women in digital women. Using their experience working with girls and women in the past five years we believe we have identified a good partner to help us scale our product. 

We are also partnering with Makerere University, the largest University in Uganda, and recently ranked among the top 10 on the African continent. Through private and public sector partnership we are able to scale new heights to drive innovative solutions for young girls and women in Africa

Our business model revolves around a 10% commission on each completed job on the freelance marketplace. The majority of training courses are offered freely however we plan to introduce low cost training courses where we shall receive a 20% commission on each course.

We have so far received one grant and have been shortlisted for another grant. However the platform will self sustainable through the 10% commission on each job on the freelance marketplace and 20% for the paid training courses.

Solve is a global platform that can give our platform visibility. It also has a wide array of development and implementing partners that might pick interest in our novel product offering

We are mainly seeking partners at this stage but we are open to any kind of support that we might come across. 

We are seeking organizations that are willing to use our marketplace to post jobs, provide us with curated learning materials, hosting companies

Product development

Developing online learning materials

Product development

Developing online learning materials

Product development

Developing online learning materials

Product development

Developing online learning materials

Product development

Developing online learning materials

Product development

Developing online learning materials