Our story
Let’s get a million
people into work.
We started with five people in Kakuma. Now we’re building a way for a million people to learn useful skills, use AI well and earn a living.
01 / Davos · January 2019
20 years at Infosys.
Then came Davos.
Mohamed Anis had spent more than 20 years at Infosys. Then he heard Mohamed Hassan speak at the World Economic Forum.
Hassan’s message was simple. People in refugee camps needed a chance to learn and a chance to work.
Anis could not leave it there. He started StepUp.One.
“We need access to education whilst at the camp, we need access to opportunity.”
02 / Kakuma · April 2019
Five people.
Let’s make this work.
Five people in Kakuma, Kenya. That was our first pilot.
People can finish course after course and still wait for a chance. We wanted the next step to be paid work.
We have tried many approaches since then. Changed the training. Changed the tools. Tried again.
That is still the job: help people learn something useful and earn from it.
03 / Why we believe we can go further
AI makes more possible.
People make it matter.
AI can help someone research faster, write a first draft and try an idea that used to be out of reach.
It can also get things wrong. A person still needs to check the facts, spot the gap and make the work better.
That is what we’re teaching: how to use AI, how to question it and how to finish the job.
See how we teach it
Is it true?
Does it help?
Would I put
my name to it?
04 / Our mission
A million people.
A chance to earn.
Our ambition is to reskill and employ a million people. We are not there yet.
AI makes us more hopeful about getting there. But it will take good teaching, hard practice and businesses willing to put people’s skills to work.
We began with five.
We’re thinking much bigger.