Read the news, and initial reports about the Horn of Africa1 are grim with famine and conflict dominating the headlines. But despite a food crisis and flare-ups of violence, key areas of the economy are growing steadily. Even in the face of limited infrastructure, large numbers of young Somalis are embracing new technology, especially mobile phones. In a single 5-year period, cell phone penetration in the region has jumped by 1,600 percent—an increase that outpaces neighboring Kenya and nearby Sudan.2
Leveraging this trend, mobile phone software venture Souktel has partnered with US-based NGO Education Development Center (EDC) to develop a cell phone-based job information service for youth, called JobMatch. The service is being implemented through funding from USAID as part of EDC’s “Shaqodoon” project (which means “job seekers” in Somali). JobMatch aims to tackle youth unemployment by providing real-time, accurate information to youth about where work can be found. The service’s underlying logic posits that youth unemployment is due not only to economic conditions, but also a lack of good resources to connect youth with employers. Across the Horn of Africa, web access is low, many communities don’t receive newspapers, and social networks are limited. Through mobile technology, youth can leapfrog these obstacles and get regular access to employment information.
The technology itself is sophisticated, but easy to use. As part of training courses delivered by EDC and local NGO partners, young job seekers create “mini CVs” by answering a short series of questions via SMS (text message). These questions ask youth about their location, skills, experience, and more. At the same time, local employers (who learn about the service through EDC staff outreach) create “mini job ads” through a similar process. Both sets of information are uploaded from users’ phones to a central database. Then, at any time, youth or employers can text “Match Me” to a 3-digit service hotline to receive an instant listing of all jobs or potential candidates that match the criteria in the mini CV or mini job ad. Once they are matched, employers and job seekers can contact each other directly, using contact details provided in the match message, to set up in-person job interviews.
Since the service’s launch in 2009, over 8,000 youth have signed up as part of their participation in EDC programming, and about two-thirds have secured internships or jobs with local employers. One satisfied user is 22-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Abdullah. Last year he found a local government internship through JobMatch. “I applied for the internship straight away,” he recalls, and was hired immediately. Now, instead of debating local politics with his friends in a café, Abdullah is working for the mayor. “Every morning, I look forward to dressing up and going to work,” he recounts. “This has given me a morale boost, skills to find a job, and confidence to look for work when my internship is over.”
When it launched, JobMatch was the first mobile phone job information service ever provided in the Horn of Africa, and it came at the perfect time. The region’s labor market was growing but there was no easy way for employers and job seekers to connect. Text messaging offered a cheap, fast, and efficient solution. When asked in evaluation surveys how the use of mobile technology has helped youth gain employment in the region, local users and implementing staff mentioned this cost savings as a major benefit. They also cite other key advantages of SMS job matching over traditional methods like print ads, family social networks, or radio job announcements:
- Savings of time. Where project staff would otherwise phone youth one by one to inform them of each available job, they can now link thousands of young people with multiple job postings instantly—a reduction of hundreds of hours of staff time.
- Savings of money. Youth cited a substantial decrease in the amount of money spent on transportation to search for jobs in person and for fees spent on job searching at internet cafés, where web access is often limited and bandwidth is low.
- Outreach to more people. Given the ease of large-scale communication via SMS, project staff were able to rapidly grow the number of young job seekers reached through JobMatch services relative to other outreach strategies (such as in-person job center consultations and one-on-one phone calls). In peak periods, the service attracted over 1,500 new users per month via text message.
A survey of 200 random youth service users carried out in mid 2011 underscores these results: 86 percent of respondents reported that JobMatch helped them find work more effectively than other resources, like local newspapers. Over half of the youth surveyed had found jobs through the service, and over 80 percent of these newly-employed youth reported income levels that were higher than any previous job’s wages.
Mustafa Othman, the Shaqodoon project’s technology manager, highlights JobMatch’s strengths: “Because of [the region’s] poor infrastructure, it can be difficult to find out about available jobs. This service helps bypass some of those obstacles thanks to mobile technology. Each day, we upload new jobs and internships onto a Souktel database, which registered users can search from any simple mobile phone. Now youth have access to opportunities that they only dreamed of in the past.”
But the service has also faced several challenges. First, Somali mobile networks occasionally experience technical problems that slow the delivery of text messages to service users. Second, many young job seekers in the region have low literacy levels, and therefore find it difficult to utilize a system which relies on text-based commands. In response, Souktel is now creating an audio, menu-based version of the service, which will enable illiterate job seekers to create mini CVs and search for jobs alongside their literate peers.
Initial skepticism toward the service has been another hurdle. In many communities, job seekers and employers initially doubted that mobile phones could actually be an effective tool for finding work or staff —either because they see mobiles as solely social devices, or because they feel intimidated by the service’s sign-up and search processes. To address this challenge, local staff worked proactively to show job seekers and employers how simple it is to get job market information via mobile through hands-on, local technology demonstrations. These sessions gave users a chance to ask questions and try the service first-hand, building buy-in. Indeed, the importance of this type of direct-to-user local training has emerged as a key lesson learned from the project.
Having worked hard to address these challenges, the JobMatch team is now focusing on scaling up the service that has become a well-known brand in the region. In early 2012, EDC and Souktel plan to launch a similar service in Rwanda to support a USAID-funded youth livelihoods training project there. By mid-year, a similar JobMatch service will also launch in Jordan through USAID support. While all of these countries share the challenge of preparing youth for the workforce, they’ll now also share something else: an innovative mobile phone-based tool for linking labor supply and demand.
Acknowledgments
This publication was produced for review by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It was prepared by Jacob Korenblum of Souktel.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.
Notes From the Field are brief stories, usually contributed by field-based staff and practitioners, relating experiences and lessons learned through their microenterprise development and financial inclusion work. Notes From the Field are an excellent way for practitioners to share stories with others and contribute to continuous learning in the microenterprise development field.
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