Tabiya

Tabiya

Tabiya

Open-source digital infrastructure connecting young jobseekers with economic opportunities through AI-powered skills discovery and job matching

Washington, DC, USA

USA

Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit

Youth unemployment is a critical global challenge, with 260 million young people not in employment, education, or training. This crisis disproportionately affects low and middle-income countries (LMICs), where 94% of youth NEET live. The problem extends beyond inactivity—84% of employed youth in Africa work informally, with demographic pressure intensifying as 76 million new youth enter Africa's workforce by 2050. Three critical barriers prevent effective labor market intermediation: First, young labor market entrants struggle to articulate their capabilities while employers cannot efficiently identify qualified candidates. This gap widens for those with skills gained through informal and unpaid care work—disproportionately affecting women, who comprise 66% of NEET youth globally. Second, while technology could bridge these gaps, existing solutions are prohibitively expensive and fail to capture the nuanced data needed in LMICs, resulting in vendor lock-in with proprietary systems that organizations cannot adapt to local needs. Third, the lack of common standards and digital public infrastructure creates siloed data ecosystems. Nonprofits develop custom solutions independently, resulting in costly duplication of efforts and suboptimal tools that perpetuate barriers to coordinated youth employment interventions.

Tabiya builds open-source, AI-powered digital infrastructure for inclusive labor markets in low- and middle-income countries. Our platform offers modular, interoperable tools that governments, non-profits, and other labor market intermediaries can adopt individually or as a complete system based on their needs. We address both sides of the labor market: jobseekers and opportunity providers. Our platform consists of two complementary product suites: 1. A youth-facing platform enabling partners to elicit detailed profiles from young people—including skills from informal and unpaid experiences—and support career exploration through our conversational AI tool (Compass by Tabiya) to generate skills profiles and formal CVs. 2. An opportunity aggregation platform with tools for collecting and structuring job opportunities from diverse sources. Our Livelihoods Classifier uses natural language processing to extract relevant data from unstructured job postings and tag them using our taxonomy, making fragmented listings usable for matching. An analytics layer connects supply with demand by comparing skills from youth profiles against requirements in available opportunities, generates potential matches, and provides predictive analytics. Our Inclusive Livelihoods Taxonomy serves as the foundation—a flexible classification of jobs and skills that reflects the full spectrum of economic activity, providing a shared, localizable structure for standardizing skills and opportunities.

Our solution directly serves labor market intermediaries—government employment agencies, youth-focused NGOs, job platforms, and training providers—primarily in LMICs where labor markets are highly informal. While our tools benefit all individuals using these organizations, we specifically focus on three underserved segments: unemployed and potential labor force participants struggling to find opportunities, ~260 million youth NEET and 2 billion informal workers worldwide lacking stability and protections. These groups, disproportionately including women and youth in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Our solution impacts their lives by: Recognizing Informal and Unpaid Work Our inclusive livelihoods taxonomy explicitly values human capital gained from informal jobs, unpaid caregiving, and other "unseen" activities, creating new visibility for underserved populations—especially youth and women in LMICs. Surfacing and Articulating Skills Our conversational AI assistant, Compass, helps individuals articulate context-specific skills, including those from otherwise “unseen work”, and translate them into structured profiles, particularly benefiting those who struggle with traditional career advising methods. Empowering Local Organizations Our modular, open-source solutions enable intermediaries to provide personalized employment support recognizing the critical human element in informal markets. Driving Systemic Change By promoting interoperable, open solutions, Tabiya creates ecosystem-level impact, reducing duplication and facilitating collaboration within and across markets.