The awards recognize and celebrate Kenyans who have developed ICT solutions that drive economic growth and social development as outlined in Kenya’s Vision 2030. They were presented by Mugo Kibati who explained, “Encouraging local innovation is critical for Kenya to achieve Vision 2030. There are a lot of young people who come up with brilliant innovations but it goes to waste if the ideas are not monetized.” Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communications was present to congratulate the winners.

Mugo Kibati, Chairman of Vision 2030; Alex Masika, Business Development Manager, DDD; Hellen Odumbe, Kenya IT and Outsourcing Society and Reinhardt Kisala, DDD.

A pioneering social enterprise, DDD creates jobs for talented youth in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya by delivering business process outsourcing services to clients worldwide. At the same time, DDD’s data management operators are able to obtain a university education, with scholarship assistance. Over ten years, the organization has grown to employ nearly 1000 staff; 500 youth have earned university degrees with DDD’s support.

“We are delighted that Cisco, a strategic partner of DDD since 2009, is continuing to support our initiatives as we scale our social enterprise to create more technology-related jobs for youth”, said Michael Chertok, DDD’s Chief Development Officer. “In Kenya, where we have been operating for one year, we currently employ more than 100 youth from slum areas of Nairobi. Our goal is to employ 300 young adults from areas like Kibera and Mathare by 2013. This grant will enable us to accelerate hiring, increase our productivity and offer higher margin services, strengthening our economic sustainability”, Chertok added.

DDD is the prior recipient of three in-kind equipment grants from Cisco that power our business. These include high capacity network switches to support bandwidth intensive content conversion processes; firewalls which provide increased security for client data, routers that optimize network performance during peak load times and the latest wireless access point technology available.

“Cisco’s Public Benefit Investment (PBI) is funding DDD to facilitate scale, sustainability and long-term impact for its beneficiaries. We are delighted that the grant will help DDD to increase technology based skills development, education, and employment opportunities of disadvantaged youth in Kenya, to help them become economically self-sufficient. It will also enable them to scale up work in Kenya and beyond to reach more disadvantaged youth. Through our CSR activities, our goal at Cisco is to ensure long-term social impact for youth so they are able to compete in the 21st century workforce and become economically independent. In Kenya, we have been working with DDD to employ students from our Cisco Networking Academies in Kibera and Kariobangi, as well as the Deaf Aid Academy; to date they have recruited more than 20 students from these training programs,” commented Charu Adesnik, Manager, Economic Empowerment Investment Portfolio Public Benefit Investment at Cisco.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

eAsia is an annual international event with the objective of reinforcing technology and knowledge-centric growth and needs of Asia.  The eAsia Awards have the aim of acknowledging unique and innovative initiatives in the use of Information and Communication Technology for Development.  Nominations for the awards are screened by an eminent jury, which selects award recipients in each category.  The Award for Best Employment Creation Initiative is in the category of Driving Economy. eAsia is sponsored Cisco Systems, GPiT, HP, Huawei, Intel, Polycom, Samsung and UNDP.

This is a partnership between the British Library and brightsolid online publishing to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library’s vast collection over the next 10 years.  Digital Divide Data supported brightsolid to conduct the digitization process that made this possible.

When I first joined DDD, the first thought that came into my mind was what I could do to achieve business sustainability and to deepen DDD social impacts.   As part of my assignment as management trainee during my first three months in Phnom Penh, I observed and saw a big room for improvements in the ways we did things, in our business model as well as the culture to support our growth, sustainability and long term success.    I started building a team by training them in the hard and soft skills needed for their day to day job.  I instilled in them the inner strength, the strong passion, the wish to see DDD future success, and their important roles in realizing the vision, the “can do attitude” , the “ non-discrimination attitude”, the “non hierarchical management system” and most of all, the “dedication for the good of all”.

Your leadership at DDD has shifted how we think about our mission.  Beyond creating jobs and building skills, we now aim to develop young leaders.  How did you come to see this opportunity?

While at DDD, I have seen many young, smart people, who are the country’s future, who already have the strong passion to build a better world and the potential to do so and successfully only if they have the skills needed and the opportunities.   These are the main reasons that drove me to come up with the model to build these young leaders in the way DDD can afford and benefit its business needs.

How has your experience as a woman influenced how DDD supports the young women in our program?

I would say my leadership position had a real impact on all the women whom I managed at DDD.  They looked at me as a role model to strive for success.  My full support and guidance gave them the opportunity to try, to shine and to excel.  Through a merit based system, they all have proved that they too have the ability not less than their male counterparts and in many cases, they are performing even better.

You’ve had a unique way of giving staff opportunities to grow into new roles.  Can you tell us about how you promoted people at DDD?

The way I did this was to encourage staff to do their utmost  to perform, to be creative and to take initiatives to improve the way they do things.  In addition to this, I created a leadership development program to develop those who showed leadership potential.  Each management trainee was put in a leading role to apply what they learnt to manage and improve their work.  After a period of between 3-6 months, managers had enough information to decide who was the best fit.

Many of us at bring aspects of our different faith traditions into our work.  How have your Buddhist beliefs and values influenced your work at DDD?

I was born as a Buddhist but I gained a real understanding about Buddhist values from my MBA program in Australia where we learnt about people management,   leadership and social enterprise.    We discussed Buddhist, Confucius and Lao Tse concepts and where they can effectively address our modern ways of doing things.  We studied how to apply those into the workplace in order to bring out the best value in the people whom we are managing in our current machine like world. 

Can you tell us a bit about your new venture into the jewelry business? How do you intend to take what is now a for profit business and make into a social enterprise?

My new venture takes a very similar to approach to DDD; we are producing jewelry for top online stores in the US market and employing the poor and disabled. In terms of training, we are focusing in two main areas;   specific technical training and soft skills.  We are planning to grow to up to 1000 staff in the future and create the best mega online retail store that will bring pride to the nation and our staff.   We are  now in the stage of developing our business plan to build our own brand and expand the market.

DDD has contracted to carry out the digitization of the survey with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Germany’s agency for international cooperation in sustainable development.  GIZ is providing technical assistance to the Royal Government of Cambodia in conducting the identification program.  Each of the nine provincial planning offices involved in this year’s program will send packets of completed household survey questionnaires to DDD.  Operators will convert the data to digital form in both Khmer and English, the first for Cambodia’s government and the second for the international agencies supporting the program, the Federal Republic of Germany, the European Union, AusAID and UNICEF.   DDD will coordinate workflow with each planning office and ensure meticulous quality assurance for the offices and GIZ.

Along with the surveys, planning officials are collecting digital photographs of each household identified as poor so that households can be issued beneficiary ID cards.  DDD will use photography tracking records to rename each photograph using a household code.  The ID cards should make providing social services more efficient.

Cambodia also expects to use its valuable new digital tool to help in meeting its commitment to reduce poverty by 1% each year as part of the UN Millennium Goals.