Just over a year ago, we kicked off Hirefreehands with a focus on connecting African tech talent to the global workforce. Since then, we’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of brilliant techies across the continent, and amazing companies across the world. Over this period, we’ve also had a front row seat to see & understand the critical pain points of all the key players involved in this equation. This made the next step of our journey very clear — and today, we’re glad to share our evolution as our story continues…
We are now Propel!
Our vision has grown beyond simply connecting African talent with global work opportunities, to driving the growth, advancement and exposure of the African tech ecosystem as a whole. We’re doing this in two new ways — by (1) curating the entire tech population in Africa through the building blocks of existing talent communities, and (2) developing the infrastructure these communities need to thrive and grow faster.
This will further accelerate our goal to solve the tech talent shortage problem across the world, and help companies grow without borders.
Why Communities?
Across Africa, there are thousands of organizations doing incredible work in upskilling talent, building community and driving diversity in the tech scene. These tech communities serve as the building blocks for the rapid digital transformation that’s happening across the continent, and are always on the lookout for better (and more efficient) ways to organize, understand, serve and empower their members — helping them achieve their professional goals and drive inclusion. This is where Propel comes in.
We’re building infrastructure for the Open Talent Economy in Africa — a technology stack with distinct, critical layers that will power the Future of Work. As Hirefreehands, we started with the ‘Access-to-Work’ layer, helping fast-growing companies in Europe seamlessly hire & onboard hundreds of African developers, designers and digital specialists through our platform. This layer, built on decentralized skill assessment, deep-data profiling and monitored talent progression, now serves as a perfect springboard for our next layer — Community-as-a-Service (or CaaS for short … more on this to come).
Moving in this direction, tech communities of all shapes and sizes are now an important part of our mission. Since September, we’ve onboarded some amazing tech talent communities — SheCodeAfrica, Ingressive For Good, Herconomy, Friends of Figma & Semicolon to name a few. Our ecosystem is growing in size, and accelerating to hit 1,000,000 individuals across 10 African countries by mid-2022. We’re super-excited about this, and in the coming weeks and months, we will be making more announcements on big steps around our evolution, growth and the introduction of our CaaS engine.
What this means for all of us
The African tech talent ecosystem holds a lot of promise and we’re glad to be at the forefront of this. Our dream and purpose remains the same — to enrich lives through meaningful work & inclusion. Our growing team is pumped for this new phase and excited to continue this journey with a steadfast focus on creating value and driving impact, both locally and globally.
The future is really exciting, and we can’t wait to share more.
With love from the Propel team.
P.S. Enjoy this short video put together by our friends at Check DC to mark this milestone announcement :)
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