Social Builder Academy

We believe that women must be supported to drive, rather than be driven by, economic transformations due to technological disruption.

Today, they hold less than 25% of all jobs in the tech industry, a rate falling. The fast growing skill gap puts them at risk of becoming increasingly excluded from decent work.

We urgently need to close the gender gap in the digital sector. At Social Builder, we tackle this with a women-centered, holistic and partnership approach putting communities at the center of the solution. We believe that it is they who will be able to create this profound change and give women the necessary confidence, skills and support for their transition into the digital economy.

Social Builder Academy is a strong tool to empower communities. This platform centralizes high quality and innovative personalized programs to guide, train and connect girls and women to peers and opportunities.

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we urgently need to close the gender gap in the digital sector.

Almost 400 million more women than men have no access to the internet, and the gender gap is widening especially in developing countries. While the access gap remains important, it is rapidly being surpassed by the skills gap.

Among the complex root causes of this gap is the pervading socio-cultural mindset that technology is for men. Women today hold less than 25% of all jobs in the global tech industry, with this proportion dropping drastically in higher-paid leadership or technical fields. Combined with digital skills fast becoming a prerequisite to stay in the labour market, women risk becoming increasingly excluded from decent work.

Social Builder Academy is a free online platform and mobile app that will inspire, train, and support 250,000 girls and women in their transition to the digital sector. It will provide high-quality and innovative content focusing on the essential skills required to seize the opportunities offered by the digital sector.

It is a unique idea for 3 reasons.

First, it provides on a unique platform, the 3 types of services necessary to support girls’ and women’s access to the digital sector:

• “Explore” will inspire them to explore the sector and guide professional choices to overcome biases about women in tech,
• “Learn” will offer certified job-ready training programs,
• “Connect” will strengthen access to community supports and economic opportunities.

In addition, the Social Builder Academy is a tool made available free of charge to local actors who wish to support girls and women in accessing the digital economy. These actors, trained to use the platform, will deploy the training programs according to the specific needs of the populations they support.

Finally, the content will be high-quality, innovative and designed in collaboration with the communities it is addressing to ensure it is efficient.

Social Builder Academy will focus primarily on girls and women who can most benefit from the essential technical and relational skills required to thrive in the digital economy. Depending on the country or the territory of implementation of the project, they are likely to be unemployed, self-employed or in precarious economic situations.

As Social Builder Academy is designed to serve girls and women who have accumulated various factors of marginalization, we want them to be involved in the design work. Our model is based on co-constructing the platform with local communities. 

In each region the app is made available, we will then gather these
communities of local stakeholders and partners who will help identify and reach the girls and women we wish to serve.

The 3 services of the apps focus on providing a complete set of resources for women and girls to explore the different opportunities in the digital sector, identify the skills they need, learn through a certifying program and connect to the market they are either going to look for a job in or create their own income generating project. They are building confidence in their capacity to use digital tools in their daily life (banking systems, job boards…) and for professional projects.  

To address the specific needs of women and girls regarding their experiences, age or area, we will use a “personae” approach.

To illustrate this, we can imagine various profiles. For instance :

• Women entrepreneurs who are entering market platforms. They know how to write. We are proposing courses for them to sell their products or services online.
• Students, building their professional journey and careers in highly developing sectors. Profiles can also be women specifically learning some softwares or particular skills.
• Among many others!

Across all of these specific expectations, we have common core courses teaching about the future of tech or online security education for instance.

Indirectly, working with a comprehensive set of partners, we wish to offer the platform to build specific content for their beneficiaries and the community they serve, making the Social Builder Academy also a B2B2C model.

Currently, a grassroot feminist community or actors of digital empowerment need to purchase a LMS in order, to provide their own training content. Alternatively, some ready-made solutions are not extensive or adapted. We believe they have identified best the needs of their communities.

The app tackles both aspects of providing quality content but also making it accessible and inclusive, adapting to the users’ needs.

Our program managers responsible for training communities in the use of the platform and monitoring its deployment will be trained to collect feedback from women and communities alike.

Guiding the users through the services of Social Builder Academy will serve the purpose of upskilling them but also accompanying them through their project implementations. The self-learning will be complemented by virtual classes and interactive tools setting a rhythm.

Women and girls represent a marginalised population in the digital sector. The growing gender divide both in terms of access and skills puts them at risk of being cast aside from the job market and digital transformation. Social Builder Academy will equip women with digital literacy skills and provide, based on the community’s needs, the necessary skills and network to start their own income-generating projects. By proposing the “Explore”, “Learn” and “Connect” services, we address the digital needs of the communities we serve. 

Over the past decade, Social Builder has developed an integrated approach combining the three principles explore, learn and connect that will be translated in the Social Builder Academy.

Over the past year, the digitization process further confirmed the scalability of our solutions. The variety of digital tools we used in different programs made us realize the advantage of creating one single platform to put the content we developed online and how our model can easily be replicated.

Based on the ten-year experience and expertise rooted in measurable facts on how to accelerate girls and women transition into the digital economy, we are at the prototyping phase, building the technological specifications and creating the communities we will implement Social Builder Academy in. 

Social Builder Academy is an innovative project because of the combination of a comprehensive methodology, our reaching out to equip local actors with tools to empower their communities and high quality content. 

On a single platform, women and girls have access to the 3 types of services necessary for their access to the digital sector: 

• Inspiration content in “Explore” to guide professional choices and make them aware of the stereotypes about women in tech, helping them fight those,
• “Learn” with certified job-ready training programs,
• “Connect” providing community support and economic opportunities.

In addition, the Social Builder Academy is a tool to equip local communities with a free online mobile platform for them to create programs and contents.

Finally, the content will be high-quality, innovative and designed in collaboration with the communities it is addressing to ensure it is efficient.

Those three factors reflect the three pillars of Social Builder: making it women-centered, holistic and co-constructed with the communities we serve.

We wish to change the perception that the digital sector is a man’s world. Before launching Social Builder Academy in a country, we will identify local needs in terms of skills and the situations of girls and women. We will adapt the programs accordingly.

Lifting the biases and bridging the gap will accelerate the next generations to engage in ICT careers. Making the platform available for other impact driven actors to use will also drive change in the communities they serve.

Currently, our solution without the app serves a community of 62,000 women. 24,000 followed “explore” programs, 37,000 “learn” programs. We have built a community of 250 partners as well. In the first year of Social Builder Academy, we expect 10,000 women and girls trained in one country. 

Building on, in the third year of the project we expect to have served 150,000 in 4 countries and in 5 years we expect to serve 250,000 disenfranchised women and girls. 

The countries include France, Tunisia, Sénégal, Nigeria and South Africa. 

We define our KPIs for each service we will provide on the platform: 

• Explore: Number of women who followed our explore course, Percentage of girls and women who want to pursue a career in tech.
• Learn: Number of women trained in digital skills, number of women who generated income (access to employment or entrepreneurship opportunities after using the platform) 
• Connect: number of public, private and not-for-profit partners in the community using the platform, number of community members trained to use the platform, number of local partner companies, number of IT professionals engaged on the connect service.

In total, we wish to have, by year 3, 150,000 women served by the Social Builder Academy and reach 250,000 by year 5, in five different countries. 

In parallel, we measure the growth of our partnerships network. For the project we would need 20 partners per country, making up a total of 120.

We base these KPIs on the current impact measure framework composed by 14 criteria divided in these 3 categories. A dedicated team is in charge of this reporting. 

4 people : 1 contractor full time, 1 contractor part time, 2 employee part time

Social Builder as a French leader of the women in tech field has engaged in gender equity issues actively, providing both training and advocacy material.

Through our various programs to inspire, train and connect them to job opportunities, we served 62,000 women in France over the past decade with a return-to-work rate of our reskilling program of 85%.

We advocated women’s participation in the digital sector, partaking in national legislative processes, assisting local authorities in shaping their public policies and co-founding a national foundation dedicated to women digital inclusion with 40 partner companies (Femmes@Numérique). We published several studies documenting the state of gender equality in the tech sector. Embracing a systemic approach, we have been collaborating with and accompanying the whole ecosystem - academics, private, public, non-profit stakeholders - to facilitate inclusion and promotion of women in the tech industry. 

We are keen on using the power of technology to scale feminist solutions (Adabot.fr).

Over the past 2 years, we have created networks for international expansion with feminist and digital grassroots organizations particularly in the circles of the Tech and Innovation Action Coalition of the Forum Generation Equality but not limited to them.

Our team is impact driven, dedicated to creating scalable solutions to make girls and women, real creators of the digital era.

Social Builder promotes gender equality in the field of digital economy. To build our teams in accordance to these goals we have put a inclusion and diversity policy.

As an employer, we encourage and nurture diversity, inclusion (i.e. diversifying the recruitment websites, the visual representations). We have a strict non-discrimination policy and promote equality.

Our actions can target women or be mixed in accordance to their specific goals. All of them contribute to professional equality and the construction of diversity (i.e. raising awareness of all the people contributing to gender stereotypes).

Our partners (trainers, mentors, coaches…) represent diversity in the professional field. One of our missions is to make people aware of the gender stereotypes and levers to best accompany our beneficiaries. We accompany them to be agents of change.

Within our organisation, at individual level, we create a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team through three principles: 

• Considerate communication, sympathetic listening is at Social Builder’s core. It allows us to improve the quality of our relations to others.
• Inclusion, Social Builder works on a day to day basis to foster inclusion and diversity in all its projects and to its ecosystem. It's the pillar of our fight against discriminations and allows everyone’s voice to be taken into account in the group. 
• Co-responsibility, making sure everyone feels like they contribute and are involved in the success of a global project.

Social Builder aims at scaling its solution. The notoriety associated with joining the MIT Solve network would be a big catalyst to widen our realm of possibilities. To make a viral solution means to serve more women and reach our goal of creating a more inclusive tech and job market faster. We also apply for the possibility to challenge the innovation of the project, the feasibility and technological aspects by such experts at tackling worldwide global problems. 

Our barriers are technology related or to the adoption by communities. We want to ensure the best application of human-centered design by working with local partners to create accurate specifications. The MIT Solve Challenges also offer visibility for funding and investment, making the project closer to its launch.

Mentorship-wise, our CEO, Emmanuelle Larroque, has had the opportunity to experience the efficiency of building meaningful international partnerships and connexions, for instance through a Fulbright fellowship. Contact with a wider community and experts will definitely be an asset in making the solution a long lasting one, affecting positively the digital sector, especially in Global South countries.

We hope that Social Builder Academy will be selected and if not, that the learning outcomes will help us foster creativity and drive our team into getting the project’s prototype ready this year. 

Social Builder works with external partners to implement technology projects. For the Social Builder Academy, we will first work with a tech partner to develop the platform and maintain it before recruiting internally a technical team, to develop the product.

In addition, we will work on a collaborative methodology to design, test and iterate that will ensure a full participation of local communities, women, girls and partners in the creation of Social Builder Academy. This approach will be ensured in programs and content creation as well.

The ultimate goal is to have an accessible platform, with primary mobile design, to  make sure content is available in areas with low connectivity, on mobile phones, in different languages, with easy-to-use features.

Active support on the technological aspect will come as helpful at all stages of the development to ensure that the technology is efficient and working to the vision of the product and that the UX design takes into account women’s needs. 

MIT’s faculty help and network would be a tremendous asset to the success of the project. Their expertise and support could be used in the design of the technology, from development as well as for UX.

Social Builder Academy is aimed at European countries, starting with France, and African countries (Tunisia, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, identified by the UN as the most mature countries in Africa to engage in e-commerce and digital transition).

The diversity of local markets, of languages and cultures will require specific marketing strategies and studies to target the most underserved and vulnerable women and girls.

The Solve’s network would open a lot of opportunities with the Palo Alto based partners, tech companies such as HP but also the World Bank among so many others, or Solvers such as those already operating in one of our target countries (Nucleus) or on closely linked themes (The Digital Citizen Fund, Practical Education Network, Techmobile Eneza, Girls4Girls, Moringa School, Erase all Kittens, Tamo junto, CENTURY Tech...). 

Social Builder already works with refugee communities in France. The scalable nature of the Social Builder Academy makes adaptation of our explore, learn and connect services and app in different languages and for different communities entirely in the scope of our solution. We wish to reach all women and girls, regardless of the various factors of marginalization they are subjected to and empower them to get confidence to join the digital economy, propose their own project or join the job market in the digital field. 

Social Builder Academy’s core objective is to empower women and girls, but also the community actors that serve them. Digital inclusion, digital literacy and bridging the gender digital divide, as well as the digital skill gap are at the heart of our solution. Given the highly growing nature of the tech sector and the digital economy, we want women to have their shot at joining it and creating a representative tech sector where they won’t only hold one quarter of all jobs.

Social Builder Academy is a platform that among other core content will contribute actively to the safe use of technology to amplify girls’ and women’s voices in a safe way. Courses on the safe use of social media platforms but also contents according to specific local, age-related or context specific needs will be proposed through the personae interface.