South Africa has an overwhelming supply of young talented people. 

Unfortunately still today, there’s a barrier to access tertiary education and opportunities for lots of communities.  Wealth and access to technology isn’t the only barrier.

Onboarding challenge:

The biggest challenge and our biggest success determinator. During onboarding, we want to capture all information that’s usually required in a scholarship/internship application. This includes personal information, documentation and any educational qualifications and experience to date. A very tedious process. If we succeeded, the rest of the application process would be almost ‘automatic’.

Trust becomes more crucial when asking personal information so early on in the user journey. The design challenge was establishing enough trust and perceived value upfront to prevent drop-off during this 'heavy' data capture phase

Budget challenge:

Budget is always a constraint. Foonda is a startup, and can’t afford fully custom built tech intelligence. Most of the features had to be executed in ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions to get tech MVP out.  This required a lot of collaboration between me and the solutions architect, to define the features and their behaviour on the front end. 

Technical challenge:

We chose a PWA not just for budget, but for Financial Inclusion. Our target demographic often relied on older devices with limited storage or expensive data plans. A PWA allowed us to offer a 'download-light' experience, ensuring access for users in emerging markets.