Micro-jobbing platform M4JAM (Money for Jam)says it has experienced growth in the last three years, reaching 320 000 local registered jobbers, with plans to expand beyond South African boarders.
Established in in 2014, M4JAM connects local brands with an on-demand workforce (called jobbers), providing them with mobile-based training to easily manage tasks and track results in real-time.
The company breaks down large projects into small tasks so that geographically-dispersed unemployed or underemployed young people, with access to a mobile phone, can complete a job quickly and independently in exchange for payment.
In 2016, the micro-jobbing platform was acquired by telco product distributor Informal Solution Providers, after failing to reach profitability within the initial funding timeframe.
Under the acquisition agreement, Informal Solution Providers bought the technology and started trading under the name M4JAM.
Speaking to ITWeb at a media breakfast on Friday, M4JAM CEO Georgina Midgley said the acquisition helped Informal Solution to build an active job creation ecosystem that focuses beyond SA’s metropolitan cities, with thousands of employment opportunities created in the remote areas of SA.
“Since the acquisition, we have re-engineered the platform and we have more than doubled the number of registered jobbers on our site. We are now also focusing on all corners of SA, particularly in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga, with around 20 000 monthly active jobbers.
“We have about 25 clients consisting of telcos, consumer goods producers and mining firms, among others, who pay for services conducted by our jobbers. We have also received interest from companies based in Mexico,Lesotho, Ghana and Uganda, who would like to use our platform and we are engaging them regarding expansion plans.”
M4JAM has 40 full-time employees and 15 developers, who are based in Cape Town.
Jobbers fall under several classifications: employed jobbers, survivor jobbers and master jobbers, who earn anything from a few hundred rand a month to R8 000 per month.
Job descriptions range from marketing and branding services, to doing mapping and distribution services, to monitoring and evaluation of consumer goods in informal merchant stores.
Creating jobs on demand
Around 3 500 jobbers sell starter packs in the informal sectors and the company says it isfocused on increasing the number of active jobbers on the platform.
“Our value proposition is premised on four pillars: market activation, community engagement, mobile incentivised training and market evaluation. Underpinning these services is the mobile phone, so our jobbers get trained on the task and they conduct most services via their phones and we are able to evaluate these services,” noted Midgley.
“Our aim is to revolutionise lives in Africa because through this phone lives can be transformed, but it’s necessary to have the right skills to enable that. In addition to training, we’re able to evaluate and analyse how their service has improved over time, and provide the right support.”
According to Stats SA, approximately 40.1% of SA’s 20.4 million young people aged 15 to 34 are unemployed.
Midgley is of the view that “jobs on demand” is a likely future trend, and the formal job market has to embrace this change, as it will become a necessity to combat SA’s high youth unemployment rate.
“We are actively persuading the Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape governments to partner with us to enable youth to do monitoring and evaluation tasks within communities. We also want to provide them with training programmes via our mobile training platform to enable them to accurately report on things like service delivery challenges within the community.
“The business sector and government need to awake to the reality of on-demand employment services which are more flexible and defy typical employment norms and expectations.”
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