The need - Poverty in Kenya averages 56%, which means that 15 million people are surviving on just $0.80 a day. But the residents of Kibera, just outside Nairobi, live on less than that. Kibera is the largest informal settlement in East Africa. An area covering just 2.5 square kilometres of land is home to almost a million people.
The unemployment rate in Kibera is 80%, leaving hundreds of thousands of individuals trapped in a state of near permanent emergency, with little prospect of finding a dignified way out. Worse, unemployment feeds into a devastating cycle of economic and social problems, including poverty, HIV-AIDS, violent crime and domestic abuse. This spiralling descent into insecurity manifests in a myriad of harmful ways.
UNICEF has warned that poverty is causing thousands of young girls in Kenya to turn to prostitution - compounding the alarming array of sexual health threats they face and, in turn, pushing them further down the spiral of poverty and vulnerability. Others try to earn a living by illegally brewing chang’aa, a maize-based spirit. As well as fuelling alcohol abuse and domestic violence, this potentially toxic brew is responsible for killing hundreds of people each year. Meanwhile, in the absence of paid work, some young men resort to roaming Nairobi’s wealthier estates, looking to rob or mug their way out of poverty.
These ‘choices’ (hardly choices) amplify the risks faced by Kibera’s residents, pushing them further down the spiral of poverty - which leads to increased vulnerability, which leads to increased poverty, and so on and on. All too easily, the situation can seem hopeless, even fated.
As the people in Kibera told us, they need jobs urgently to pull them out of these cycles of suffering. Finding work is not easy, in communities where most people cannot afford to buy a newspaper to scour vacancies, nor access online job lists. Yet even in 2003 an astonishing 85% of the people in Kiberia had access to mobile phones, shared communally. Mobile usage in Kenya has rocketed from less than 19,000 subscribers in 1999 to more than 2.4 million subscribers by 2004 - and more than 15 million subscribers by 2009. Given that Kenya has a total population of 39 million people, and that many people share mobile phones, it is clear that mobiles are the country’s most widespread communication device.
This was the key insight: seeing that mobile phones could sidestep the usual obstacles of cost and distance and provide the fastest route to jobs that the people of Kibera so badly needed.
Side-stepping the obstacles Identifying in its early stages the trend towards mobile phone use even in poorer communities, OneWorld UK was able to innovate applications that brought mobile micro-solutions to the residents of Kibera, allowing them to sidestep some of the barriers to employment that they had previously faced.
Before Kazi560 was developed, when individuals heard rumours, say, of a taxi firm in Nairobi recruiting drivers, or a restaurant needing waiters, they rushed to the city centre – only to find, by the time they got there, that the jobs were gone. Our solution was grounded in the belief that an SMS-based jobs alert service would provide a service to both employers and job-seekers. Something as simple and user-friendly as a personalised SMS jobs alert could provide Kibera’s residents with an instant channel to the information they needed.
During 2003 OneWorld UK created a social web, by deepening our links with Kenyan communities, joining up with Kenyan employers and with a local telecommunications group, Safaricom, while our software team in London developed a new mobile platform enabling the community to receive tailored job alerts. We named the service Kazi560 because ‘kazi’ is the Kiswahili word for job, and ‘560’ the short code number that the SMS service used. A pilot was launched mid-2004, and quickly demonstrated that Kazi560 was able to match potential employees with employers efficiently, creating real economic value for both.
We also developed a simple subscription model allowed Kibera’s residents to receive, via SMS, customised blue-collar job opportunities, ranging from carpentry to typing, for just 7 Kenyan shillings ($US 0.09) per message. All they had to do was specify the type of job they were looking for. Then the relevant alerts – and no others - would be sent to their phone as soon as an appropriate position became available. On receiving the alert, subscribers could instantly ring back to apply on the same mobile phone.
On the back of the successful pilot, commercial operations were launched in mid-2005. The social business model, developed with support from a Kenyan consultancy, funding from the Accenture Foundation, and support from the Accenture Development Partnership, allowed for a solid sustainability plan to be incorporated, while close cooperation with Safaricom enabled the project to gain a share of the revenue generated by the SMS messages, and allow the service to break even.
Delivering Kazi560 thus meant grappling with both technical and social complexity - giving the Mobile4Good team invaluable experience that de-risked the development of our later mobile-based applications.
Concrete outcomes – Demand for Kazi560 among local citizens more than met expectations, with 30,000 subscribers signing up within 4 months of the commercial launch. Employers also quickly came on board. Some, like ‘Budget - Rent a Car’, soon reported that they had begun to rely solely on this service to meet all their employee recruitment needs. Quite an accolade.
Support from the community (e.g. village chiefs, NGOs, youth organisations), excellent press coverage (both Kenyan and global - BBC Radio, BBC Online, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post) and a strong relationship with the Kenyan government and links to Department of Labour under the theme ‘Show us the Jobs’ ensured that awareness of the service was excellent.
All this resulted in a steep rise in subscriber numbers - and recognition from Kenya’s President Kibaki for Antony Mwaniki, the local entrepreneur who had joined the OneWorld UK team to implement the service. A strong relationship with Safaricom led to a generous revenue share, and extensive promotion of Kazi560 in Safaricom’s magazine, with full page ads and editorial.
Midway through 2006, Kazi560 reached its breakeven point of 70,000 subscribers. By the end of 2006 it had gained more than 80,000 subscribers. Over half a million job alerts had been sent out, and more than 60,000 vacancies had been filled through the service. Just three years after its initial launch, OneWorld UK handed the ownership of Kazi560 over to the company run by Antony Mwaniki as a self-sustaining and profitable social franchise. Today Kazi560 continues to operate profitably, with a five-strong team. It advertises several hundred jobs each week for its clients, which include international corporations, NGOs and local businesses.
Kazi560 has grown into Kenya’s biggest job alerts service - success encouraged the Mobile4Good team to develop its next application: LifeLines India.