The project
50 MAWSP is a project driven by the African Development Bank. It seeks to create a digital platform that empowers female entrepreneurs to access programmes, financial resources, and to create cross-border market opportunities. The platform enables the development of business strategy skills, and promotes learning, mentoring, and knowledge transfer and exchange between communities. The project encompasses the whole of Africa, and has been developed in the COMESA headquarters in Zambia.
Challenges
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Creating a networking and mentoring platform for entrepreneurial women -
Developing co-creation dynamics to coordinate all stakeholders -
Constructing a web platform and app that ensures the sustainability of the companies
The solution
In order to implement the platform, Izertis assessed the needs, design, portal development, installation, trials, preparation of the online user guide, activation and maintenance of the project. A co-creation dynamic was developed in parallel to this to address the challenge of successfully coordinating all interested parties: African organisations (COMESA, EAC, ECOWAS), the African Development Bank, potential platform users, chambers of commerce, entrepreneurial banks, etc.
Izertis also introduced its co-creation methodology during the project’s Kick-off meeting, holding ongoing workshops for 2 weeks to align the interests of all partners, and to co-define the product to be developed within the project framework.
The result
A platform based on Liferay has been created to perform networking and mentoring actions to manage users, forums and chats, able to adapt to the characteristics of African users, giving them access to programmes and financial resources, helping them explore opportunities and expand into other markets, whilst keeping up with market trends. Design Thinking Co-creation dynamics and methodologies have helped determine the best solution for the interest groups in this project.