Raïssa BanhoroIt's raining at the moment. After a big heat wave, we're entering the rainy season. So we're going to have a look around the training centre. When you take a young person who has no prospects and offer them training and a job, you change their life and the life of their family, because in Africa, when you give work to one person, you've given work to ten. The employment of one person affects at least ten others. That's the way it is in Africa. I was a little girl, very shy, very reserved. All I was really interested in was pleasing my parents, doing what my parents wanted me to do, and I did it without really complaining. You know, girls are very influenced by their mothers. And I told myself I was going to be a university teacher. I did my first year and it went well. In my second year, one morning we were told that the city was being invaded by rebels. It was the post-election crisis of 2010 in Ivory Coast. I was at school, and I was living with one of my uncles at the time, and he called me and said: 'Raissa, we have to leave the city'. And that's when we left Daloa for good. When you are young, at 25, you say: 'I want to be this by 30'. And then, just before you've finished your year, there's a crisis in the country. You are already escaping death. And we arrive and are told that the universities are closed. I stayed with my family for two years. And one morning my father told me: 'You can't stay here and do nothing. It's true that the universities are closed, but there are private universities that have opened. See if you can change your major'. I talk to my friends and cousins. My father is also talking to his friends and brothers. They tell him, 'Well, look, computer science is something interesting. It's a job for the future. I say, 'OK. As long as I can go to school, there is no problem'. And I am enrolling in an engineering school. When I started my engineering degree, I told myself that if I really want to work in this field, I need to be the best. I didn't know how to do it, but I had to succeed. So I started to engage with Ivorian communities that were talking about digital. And that's when my love for digital started. I thought, 'Oh, there is potential. Then, in 2015, I saw online that a mobile operator was launching a challenge. It was a competition to develop web and mobile applications. The theme was education. And at my godmother's house we had our 'house girl' who could neither read nor write. That's when it hit me. I thought, 'Why not develop an application so that she can learn to read, write and do maths on her own? But to be honest, I didn't know how to develop the application. How do I get someone who cannot read to use an application? It had to be something very intuitive. It should be easy to use. So we co-created the project with her. Because in the end she was the one to use it. Finally, it was the project I submitted, and I was awarded the best application developer in the Ivory Coast. We had a lot of requests for my literacy application, so we decided to formalise everything. So we created our website to develop our literacy application and work on other IT solutions. Recruitment was very complicated. We spent months looking for profiles, talents, etc. And as I was travelling a lot, I met Mr Kane. He was going to launch Simplon in Africa. Simplon is an organisation that focuses on training and integrating young people into digital careers, to transform young people who are far from employment, young people who believe that they do not have the talent for digital work. So the idea is to reach out to these young people and turn them into super developers. I immediately had stars in my eyes. I said, 'But this, this is something I want to do, a boat I want to get on'. I said to him: 'I'm going to take the challenge back to Côte d'Ivoire to develop the business locally.” We didn't have money, we didn't have a partner, we didn't have anything. We just had a vision. We often met in cafes, in my office, and that was it. And he calls me one morning and says, 'Raissa, they want us in Abidjan finally'. I say to him, 'They want us in Abidjan finally? Did you get the money? Who gave you the money?' As a true Ivorian, I say to him, 'But did you get the money?'; 'Who gave you the money?' He says, 'I've just spoken to the Société Générale Foundation and they agree to finance us in Côte d'Ivoire, in Senegal, in other territories, and over three years.' And so we got the good news and it allowed us to open the first factory in Abidjan on 6 December 2018. In the three years from 2018 to 2021, we trained almost 120 young people with a 100% employment rate. We placed all the young people we trained in our programme. We took care of 300 women in acculturation, we trained 1000 children in the children's workshops, we strengthened the capacities of start-ups and in two thousand twenty-one we received another three years of support. The second funding allowed us to have our own centre. We have a beautiful villa where we can host several groups at the same time. We have staff who can finally work in complete privacy. We have a meeting room and we have a beautiful garden where we organise ceremonies with the students. Honestly, it has taken the activity to another level, I can say. In Africa, when you say that you are going to provide free training, people do not believe you. And when we launched the first cohort of training, we received a huge number of applications because people were curious to know how we managed to offer free training. The following year we had even more applications because not only is it free, but it is quality training. We have a teaching approach that allows a young person to be immediately employable after nine months of training, whereas at the beginning some did not even know how to turn on a computer. In this room are the learners of the web and mobile application development programme who are following the training, so I will introduce you to the other rooms. The fact that I am now the manager of a training centre and a trainer at the same time is really not far from what I always wanted to do. I said at the beginning that I wanted to be a teacher, a university teacher. Today I find myself mentoring young people, training them and helping them to find a better future. And that, is really what I always wanted to do. And today, with Simplon, we are transforming lives, telling stories and creating jobs. The vision is to be the leader in digital training in Côte d'Ivoire and Africa. Sorry for the noise, it is raining, we are outside, it is raining quite heavily, we will pass through here. So, here we have tried to create a small experimental laboratory with electronic equipment. The Raissa of my university days or teenage years and the Raissa of today are not the same person. She was someone who was very introverted, shy and she is now able to assert herself, to speak up. Humanly, it has brought me a lot and I have made some very, very, very nice encounters. I did not struggle to go to school, I did not struggle to have everything I needed. I did not know that in Abidjan you could meet young people who had dropped out of school simply because they did not have 6,000 francs to pay their tuition. 6000 CFA francs is about ten euros. They do not even have 3000 francs to take the bus. Last year, for example, almost half of our students slept here because they did not even have enough to pay for transport to get home. We had to come up with a scholarship system to pay for the students' transport. These are stories that change the way you look at life.
