Cape Town - By tapping into Cape Town’s unemployment problem, a UCT graduate has landed her dream job with IT heavyweight Google.
Shikoh Gitau’s journey to success started with a simple research paper in 2009.
The Kenyan, who was busy with her PhD in Computer Sciences at the time, had decided to visit Khayelitsha and explore how residents were using their cellphones.
She found that while many of them had phones capable of accessing the internet, most were not making use of the function.
“I started teaching a few people how to make e-mail accounts, how to use Wikipedia and how to search for things they needed.”
It was just a few days later that the 32-year-old was bombarded with urgent requests from her students. “They wanted to apply for jobs they had found online, but didn’t know how to do it.”
She soon realised that the cellphone was a clumsy device for filling out a CV, and that was how Ummeli was born.
The website allowed users to generate a CV through answering a set of simple questions pertaining to their educational background and past experience. The website would then fax the newly generated CV through to the appropriate company.
The system has snowballed since 2010 when it was first created, now boasting more than 150 000 individual users.
According to Gitau, 18 percent of the users have found jobs while another 10 percent have secured interviews.
The website’s success attracted the attention of Google and, after graduating this year, the young entrepreneur was approached by the global giant.
“Although I was initially hired for a position based in London, and then Zurich, I requested to be sent back home. Here in Kenya, I feel I can have the biggest impact.
“My passion lies with growing information technology and connectivity in Africa.”
Gitau is part of Google’s user experience group on the continent.
She said working for a huge company had many perks, namely that all employees were given one working day every week to pursue their own projects.
In this time, Gitau said, she was not trying to create the next Google or Facebook, but was rather looking for a model that worked for Africa.
“What I’m doing is about connecting people at the bottom end of the pyramid, who desperately need jobs, to job opportunities.” - Cape Argus