Aya Ragheb
Remotecoders’ research phase is almost over, so let's take a look back

Our team has grown a lot in the past few months. What started with only Hussam and Chris has now developed into a team consisting of 10 members. When Hussam joined Powercoders in 2016- a Swiss NGO founded by Chris and his wife that teaches refugees how to code- neither him nor Chris knew what the future would hold. Hussam was a graduate of the first class in 2017 and eventually joined Powercoders as a team member. During the last years, he and Chris both supported the team to grow its impact to over 200 graduates, an internship placement rate of over 90% and a job integration rate of 60%. In 2021 they decided to try and take it a step further by founding Remotecoders, a remote coding academy and an IT job integration program. Research has shown that people who work remotely at least once a month are 24% more likely to be happy and productive. But not only do the workers benefit from this way of working; according to data, companies that enable remote work have a 25% lower employee turnover rate than those that do not. Remotecoders aims to take advantage of this opportunity. Together with the Swiss government and several foundations, Remotecoders is determined to offer IT talents from vulnerable groups in North Africa and the Middle East remote job opportunities with European IT companies, focusing first on Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria. Fast forward to May 2022, when our entire team was finally able to meet in person for the first time at our Workshop in Bern. The main goal was to further define our strategies in different areas of the project. For the industry strategy, it was important to define our customer, outsourced tasks and our acquisition strategy while for the talent strategy we focused on defining our talents and their journey (acquisition, selection, education, work, exit). Lastly, the team was offered various insights into the challenges women, migrants and refugees face in our target countries, according to which we aimed to define suitable mitigation measures. As part of our Research, we conducted three Coding Days with over 100 people last month in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. The main goal was to understand the situation of the local vulnerable talents and test the overall level of our future potential talents.

We were very impressed by the quality of the talents and the great supply this could be for ICT companies. Despite the high level and qualifications, they are struggling to access opportunities and find jobs due to different reasons which Remotecoders will work hard to handle and support both talents and companies. With the support of our partners GoMYCode in Egypt and Morocco and Holberton in Tunisia, we had a very successful Coding Days!

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