We learn from many, We get inspired by a few but there’s one or two that stir us from within and propel us to act.

This 5 minute from a @refugee who has never stepped out of his refugee camp at Kakuma was one of them.

He was speaking on behalf of not just the 185,000 in Kakuma Refugee camp but for the entire 70 million+ refugees.

He inspired a bunch of us to get together and create StepUp.One in order to re-skill the refugees in the camp and connect them to global opportunities that pay. We chose “Social Media Marketing” as the skill.

Now any one of us can step by giving them a job – it’s easy – just give them your Hashtag and they will become an extension of your social media team for $100 per month. They are trained and certified using state of the art “Social Media Training” from Hootsuite and they will deliver great outcomes for your social media strategy.

Whilst Mohamed Hassan from Kakuma inspired us to create StepUp.One, it is in the success of the 5 pilot Refugees from Kakuma Camp lies the recipe for Rekindling Hope. Yasmin, Paul, Joelle, Nhial and Bahana have risen to the challenge by re-skilling themselves in Social Media Marketing, it’s now time for all of us to StepUp by providing them with an opportunity.

It’s only fair we StepUp to these pilot team of refugees if they keep their side of the bargain. While stepping up, they have also taken up the job of digitising the schools in Kakuma and bringing world class education to the 2000+ students in each of these school. You can also support their individual school digitisation project here shop

Check out the pilot refugee teams in action as they progress ahead in accumulating certificates and showcase their work. kakuma_team

“Connecting Talent to Opportunity” is one of the top issue in today’s world. While this problem exists in some form or shape in almost all developed and emerging nations, no where else it is more profound than in the refugee camps of the world.

With Gig Economy exploding all around us, I think its only fair we address this dire issue of “not able to connect the talent at the refugee camps to the right global opportunity”.

Mohammed Hassan in his opening remarks says “We need access to education whilst at the camp, we need access to opportunity. In a time when goods and capital move freely, humans are locked up in camps for years”

Hassan is asking for two things (1 and 2) but we thought we need to add two more things to complete the cycle. He is asking for all the refugees to have

For the time being, let us start with executing the Job locally only. So that they are not required to travel, that’s a problem to solve for another day.

What if we train a 1000 of them as “social media marketing experts” and connect them to global social media marketing opportunities from both large and small enterprises.

Using refugees to do your “social media marketing” itself is a massive marketing campaign for anyone willing to experiment with these teams. We could potentially assign a top-notch mentor for each of these teams.

We can help them learn a few marketable skills from an “anytime anywhere learning platform” and at the same time showcase the potential rewards by giving them access to an Uber-like “Opportunity platform”.

Every one of them must be able to see the opportunities and the associated gratification from immediate payments before they start the first lesson on “Social Media Marketing”.

Simply put we can take the “training” and “opportunity” to them right at the camp instead of trying to move them to where the physical opportunities are.

In order to make this work, we need

There are more issues to tackle when we we scale. Right from Electricity to English, Bank Transfer fee to Visa – there are more and more issues as we dig in. However, lets solve one problem at a time.