 Okay, perfect. Yes, welcome everybody to a quick input on digital fair trade and how that can be a potential game changer in the area of digital work. I already had the chance today to pitch the organization that I'm coming from, Digital Alliance, and it was something where I could pitch three minutes and then get 15 minutes of feedback. I really enjoyed that, not talking too much but also getting feedback, so I hope it's okay if I if I don't use the 20 minutes slot only of blowing information on you but maybe take 10 minutes to give you some input and then we make this a conversation, questions and so on if that works for you. Yes, so digital fair trade, what is that about? Don't be surprised. What I'm showing you here is not a perfectly presented, a perfectly prepared presentation. This is actually a report which you can find also on our website digitallions.co which we wrote together with the World Fair Trade Organization. Yeah, sorry, awesome for the intro. My name is Jan Fedler. I am the co-founder of Digital Alliance based legally in Germany but our operations are mainly in Kenya. What we do is we train young people in graphic design, animation and web development to then market their digital services online on a fair trade basis so we create opportunities in the rural areas of Kenya under fair trade conditions. So yeah we wrote this report together with the World Fair Trade Organization and yeah I'm just using this report a little bit as a red rota faden how you say in German to guide us a bit through but don't be worried about the small text and stuff you're not meant to read all this. But if you want to go dig in later you know there's a report you can find the details over there. Maybe a quick question in the beginning who is familiar with the concept of fair trade? Who is not? Okay good and then that makes it a little bit easier. Yeah maybe to start in the beginning the concept of digital fair trade is really about bringing the digital bringing the fair trade principles to the digital realm. Why? Because there is there's a bunch of opportunities that come with the with the digitalization and digital work in terms of digital platforms, outsourcing platforms such as Freelancer, Fiverr.com Upwork some of you might know them so there's lots of opportunities that come with these digital work platform where you can sell graphic design where you can sell other digital services and work, transcription services, translation services, data entry, anything. But there's also lots of challenges that come with it. So the idea of bringing fair trade principles to this digital realm is really to ensure that we can take the good from these digital work platforms from generally the concept of digital work but forego the downsides the risks and the negative aspects. Maybe digital work in numbers you can see here the number of cloud cloud work platforms and has increased from 50 in 2008 to 283 now globally two years ago. So this this area of digital work and digital platforms is really rising massively. It's a global phenomenon of course and as some of you might have guessed a large part of this is taking place in Asia, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines. These are the largest suppliers of online work. Yeah maybe not surprising many of you know Indian outsourcing companies you get many of you might get emails if you're in the working context emails from Indian outsourcing companies. Yeah so that's not too surprising. So let's jump straight to the benefits and opportunities of digital work. Yeah I'll be trying to be quick here so we can really have some time for exchange. So I'll really be very brief and we do the rest either face-to-face or you read the report later on. So this the main opportunities really of these platforms are work opportunities right a person in Kenya like the people we work with before these platforms arise or the opportunity to work even without an online platform but just like we do by by finding buyers from the global north matching them with people in Kenya to work on a website. There was no chance for for this type of work without the internet so and this this type of digital work so it's a huge income opportunity for for many people around the globe that's probably one of the greatest advantages. It is also an opportunity for social inclusion you can have people with disabilities you can have women or parents in general taking care of their children is a very flexible type of work if you design a website you can do it from home you don't need to come to a workplace necessarily. So it gives lots of opportunities like you know COVID has also shown this to us in in the global north as well. It even provides some opportunities for employee protection because of you know the transparency that is that comes with digital markets and platforms in general you can see maybe how many hours did somebody work how long did he lock in into systems and so on and maybe some of you already guessed that there are problems with this transparency and and data protection issues and so on but in theory there's also opportunity to protect employees by by digital means and you're tracking of working hours and so on and so forth. These were just some examples of the students we work with or graduates who are now web developers graphic designers. Yeah so coming to the downsides one of the main downsides is probably the unpredictability of of of your income and the insecure employment this this type of very flexible work some of you might know the term gig economy so you jump from one gig to the other you don't have fixed working contracts so that's that's a downside so flexibility always comes with these two sides. A big thing is that this digital work market on these platforms like Upwork Fiverr is pretty much unregulated or little regulated so we don't have good labor laws labor regulations in this field and it's only just emerging that players like the international labor organization are pushing for more protection in this area so because it transcends national national boundaries you have problems about taxation social security evasion and paying people not paying into their social security accounts and so on and so forth. You also have unfair conditions on these platforms these platforms are often optimizing for their consumers for the buyers so they are kind of discriminating the sellers there's usually more sellers than buyers so then there's a race to the bottom effects where too many sellers out compete themselves and prices go very much down you don't have nice cooperation mechanisms where the where the sellers could you know maybe come together and agree okay we don't go beyond a certain price which technically would be very easy on a platform but the platforms don't do that yeah so I think I have to jump about a lot of this but I told you you can read it up unfair payment is an issue yeah so I guess I really I leave it here showing you some of the pros and cons and can maybe maybe just say two more words on what we do at digital sorry digital lines so that you see how do we do it what is our approach so on the top left you see see our brand and our logo so yeah we do training of people in in northern Kenya young people around 18 to 20 years old and we train them in web development graphic design and animation and then either support them in building freelancer careers on such platforms such as Upwork Fiverr and so on or we take them into the agency which is fair trade verified so we have the world's first fair trade verified agency and what we did this together with the WFTO basically going new ground here and so that means we do pay people fairly above the local living wage which is not so difficult in the domain of websites and a design but we also provide fair conditions like prepayments so if we work on projects together even though the client has not yet paid us we pay our project people participants we provide good working conditions we our campus is completely solar powered we invest into education we invest into a woman empowerment so you can read it all up there's a list of 10 criteria that you have to fulfill if you are a fair trade player yeah and I didn't go as fast as fast as I want but I hope this gives you a glimpse of an idea of what fair trade in the digital domain can mean and yeah now I would really like to see if there's any questions thank you I think we have another mic I can also come round or you can also speak with other Mike maybe yes please Mike is coming thank you I'm Björn and I'm trying to formulate my question here but basically I'm thinking of fair trade in terms of like you bring jobs to Kenya right and and you educate them also to do this high-skilled job I guess you could consider it and maybe it's a hard question but how do you let's say more high-skilled job is still sort of linked to the global north or like Europe or or such like because of maybe a more inclusive university system or such but how do you limit us from taking their high-skilled jobs if there is any in Kenya I mean that can also be if you think reverse like we can work digitally with companies and and products and services in Kenya right and and to some extent you could see that like with Google and Apple and such like they they work with digital services globally and sort of can I guess out compete in the local markets also did you see my question or I mean it's a bit difficult I heard a little bit of the brain drain problem that you talked about that we use their talents yeah or rather that there is still there is still a gap between sort of the education levels between like industrialized countries and developing countries and yeah I mean you I guess you have to push a lot also to invest in education because it's a lot about the skill not about where they are or such like I mean a Kenyan could work for Google if they have the right skill right so yeah yeah I mean on the brain drain question it's exactly one of the goals we have to stop the brain drain we because we enable people to stay in their remote home region for example our campus we call it the world's most remote ICT campus it's in Turkana and it's not my Ruby downtown where Microsoft and Google and all of them are we are very much in the rural areas so and and yes the people work internationally but the brains stay and you know they can also work for the local market as at the same time and with their freelance and so on so there's no brain drain and on the education side yeah to some extent you said the education level is lower to some extent I don't think that's even the case but there's just less job opportunities there's lots of highly skilled people well educated but there's a high academic unemployment rate so our approach to education is more vocational training or you know start a bootcamp or a coding bootcamp like so it's a one-year very intense program but it doesn't give you a huge full five-year study but it rather shows you very hands-on how do I do a WordPress website how do I do a logo how do I you know do a 2d animations is very practical hands-on that's targeted towards income generation I don't know if that's answered your question anything you mentioned in the work is actually found on those big platforms like Fiverr so your agency is on there and what's what's your visibility the fact that you're doing all this fair trade stuff does it add value to to your workers and did you think that more could be done by other types of organizations to actually foster a need in the buyers for like getting their workforce from a fairer source so your question is like if we why we use Fiverr also or maybe you can refresh why would any of the people who buy stuff from Fiverr buy from you and how can we improve that oh yes sure yeah yeah Fiverr is actually not our main channel we tried a lot but as you say people who go there usually go by price a lot and we is hard for us to compete with India Bangladesh and so on on price so so we have to really differentiate us through our impact through our fair trade verification and that one is not so visible on Fiverr so what we dream of is actually a platform that we could call fair Fiverr or you know so we have a concept for that we worked a little bit with the ILO and other players GIZ if we could come up with such a platform but I mean you're probably tech people or some of you tech interested you can imagine it's quite a quite a thing ideally we would use some sort of open source platform model and so on but that's our dream to come up with such a platform and to to drive B2B consumers to this platform but as you said that we need to push also the consumers to or the buyers to think more about this awareness so I guess the concept is pretty new and also if you if you buy a website from a German provider you usually don't think that there's a problem to it right so you don't there's nothing bad with buying a website from a German service provider but the the main downsides more lie in this outsourcing without or without any protection through these platforms so yeah I think we need to raise awareness a little bit and our target groups are really NGOs social businesses or any business that has a strong CSR so businesses that care a lot about where does their services come from that they source so then there's a match so if you have an NGO that and we go you know go to the NGO and say look we can do your website we can do your logo they're happy because we create impact they create impact it's a good match it yeah I think I only partially answer to your question I think in theory formally we are the end of my time slot but I'm probably happy to take another one one question if anybody has okay still I hope this gave you a little bit of an opportunity to to check out something new check out digital fair trade in case anybody of you works for an NGO or whatever who needs something fair trade designed in Kenya you now know where to go to if anybody of you wants to develop a fair fiverr platform please approach me yeah and have fun on the conference thanks very much