Developer Circle Community Challenge: Pilgrimage with Nchito
How we came in 3rd place in the regional round.
Background
Developer Circles announced the 2018 community Challenge, an online hackathon calling for developers to create solutions that help build and grow a community and bring the world closer together.
My team and I worked on a solution we named “Nchito” a local name that means “job” and this solution was awarded 3rd Position in Sub Saharan Africa for regional round.
The rise of Nchito
During the Community Challenge Build Day, Wilfred Mulenga, one of the Developer Circles members, decided to pitch an idea that could help solve the problem he had faced. This was finding someone online who could fix his broken geyser.
The main issue was there was no online platform where one could search for and hire someone offering such services. He cited that most people refer to the traditional way which is calling a friend or family, asking them if they know someone who does a job, such as, painting, carpentry, car repairs, plumbing etc, or searching physically around public places to find someone who can do the job.
“There are many people that do these sort of informal jobs but it is a challenge finding the right person.”, He said.
He also mentioned that this method was time-consuming and inefficient because one would not know how skilled the person they hired until after that job had been done. Inline with with the community challenge, he believed that creating a platform that can fix this problem could help bring the community together by connecting people to those in the informal job sector.
After all the pitches had been made, the community members decided which idea they would like to work on together and Wilfred was joined by myself and Olivier JM Maniharo.
What Solution Nchito offers…
Nchito covers a gap that most job seeking platforms do not cover. Based on the Zambian workforce research of 2017 labour Force Survey by the Central Statistics Office of Zambia: ” over 70% of the employed population had informal jobs. Which means that for every 3 out of 4 employed people did not have a formal job.”
The informal job sector plays a substantial role to to Zambia’s Economy, however, there are few means currently in place that are aim at improving how people in this sector get hired. Trying to fix this problem was the foundation of Nchito.
Nchito is an online service portal that connects people with informal jobs to those seeking to hire them. It is a platform where one easily can find and hire those with informal jobs. It aims at creating a network of people with similar jobs and help broaden their market reach.
How Nchito works
Nchito is a modern-app equivalent of calling a friend or relative to ask them to recommend someone who can do a particular informal job. With Nchito, one can look into a pool of different skilled individuals and engage with them at any given moment, reducing the time they would spend searching via referrals. They can go through each individual’s profile which shows their skills and work experience.
This helps the user make a more informed decision on who they wish to engage with. Once they find the individual that suits their preference, they can instantly enter conversation with them through the messaging feature on the platform
The basic functionality of Nchito allows users to create account profiles. These profiles detail information such as, their job, job description, skills and photos displaying the work they have done. Once a user has registered, they are now on the Nchito platform and their information can be easily found in the categories section.
Other registered users can view different skilled individuals under the categories section which groups them according to profession e.g. Plumbers, Mechanics, Hairdressers etc.
Basic Features of Nchito
Profile: A user can create a profile detailing information about their job and skills. It allows the user to enter basic CV information that a potential person wishing to hire them may find useful.
Categories: Lists services currently available based on users registered on Nchito. They are grouped according to the type of job.
Messages: When you want to start a conversation with another user, you can do so by sending them a private message.
Build Process
The community challenge hackathon required the use of at least one facebook developer tool to implement the solution and we decided to use react as our primary tool for the front end. This was a challenge because it was a new library for us and we learnt a lot about React such as states, routing, conditional rendering, etc, as we were building the app.
To make things even more interesting, we decided to use Firebase as a back-end service, even though we were not all familiar with it. It was during this process that we learnt how to integrate Firebase services like user authentication, database and storage with React and we also used it for hosting of our app online. Lastly, we used github for collaboration and version control.
Working on this project proved the power that exists in working together rather than working in isolation. There was always something new to learn during the build process and it was always fun to share with teammates. Working on this challenge has definitely helped us grow as developers not just from the technical side but also the non-technical, for example, communication and time-management.
Future Plans and Development
One way that we can improve Nchito is by adding a USSD capability that can help users register on to our platform from their phone. We are aware that many people with informal jobs that want to be on our platform might not have internet access and it may be difficult for them to access a computer. It is our hope that with this feature any user with a phone that wants to get hired can register on Nchito.
Another plan in development is to create and register a similar service in our Country, Zambia so that people can actually use our platform. We want to make people’s lives easier when they want to search for people with informal jobs and we feel this service can empower a lot of people in that sector. If we are successful in the Capital City, Lusaka, we would want to move to other cities and set up Nchito there as well. And if that goes well, we would want to expand to other countries.
About the Team
Oliver JM Maniraho
Currently working as a software developer at BongoHive Technology and Innovation Hub and remotely working for University of Alabama Sparkman Center Programs mainly in JavaScript. He is a community lead at ForLoop Zambia.
He enjoys sharing what he knows with the developer community in different ways that includes articles or in community meetups.
Wilfred Mulenga
Mechatronics Engineer and Software Developer at Hackers Guild. He likes to share his knowledge of Programming and basic Electronics to others as well as learning and creating new things.
Pendo Manjele
Currently working as a solutions developer for the United Bank for Africa and one of the Co-Leads for Facebook developer circle: Lusaka Chapter. Enjoys researching and learning new technology and sharing knowledge through community meet-ups and online.
Nchito is live on the following url: https://lsk-guide-jobs.firebaseapp.com/
Thanks for reading and happy coding!!
