 So, my name is Daphne, I'm a Daphne Bouteillet-Paquet, and I am the moderator of our conversation today. I'm also the project manager of the MATCH project, and I work at the International Organization for Migration, Country Office for Belgium, and Luxembourg. I see that we might not have our presentation on the screen yet today, but this is, I believe, fine for just a few welcoming remarks. Let me introduce you the objectives of this meeting. As we would like to explore together with you the benefits of joining the MATCH projects, go through its key objectives, and discuss with some guest speakers the benefits of international recruitment. So, as you might be already aware, the MATCH project has been developed by the IOM, which is the UN Agency for Migration, and this project is funded by the European Commission. We have launched this project in January 2020, and it aims at enabling companies in four European countries to fill up their manpower gaps by recruiting highly qualified talents from Nigeria and Senegal. But I think most importantly, we would like to stress that our program also aims at building a business model that meets the needs of companies, but also contributes to the transfer of skills and knowledge, and allows our young talent to upgrade their skills. For our meeting today, we have the pleasure to welcome three speakers. So, the first speaker of today will be Rob DeLobbel, my colleague. He's our head of unit here at the Project Development Unit at IOM. And he will highlight the key features of the MATCH project. Then, I think during this webinar, we will also have the opportunity to go really through a reality check with two guest speakers who are actually already working in Nigeria and in Senegal. We will first hear Cedric Filet, you are the CEO of Aldelia. Aldelia is a private recruitment company which has an extensive presence in West Africa. And today for us, you will really focus on how to achieve high quality recruitment in Nigeria and Senegal for actually a wide diversity of profile, as you will explain. And then we will welcome Ernesto, Ernesto Streut, who is the CEO and founder of a company called Tunga. And Tunga is working in many countries across Europe and the world, and is offering distance working arrangement. From earlier conversation with some of you today, we know that at this time of crisis, distance working arrangements looks very attractive as a way to overcome mobility constraints. So Ernesto, your job will be really to actually walk us through the details and the specifics of remote working and of course give us some tips for the key to success, but also warn us about some pitfalls that our participants should be aware of. Last but not least, I think that today we would like to have a better idea of who is with us together in this digital meeting. And we have the pleasure to welcome more than 30 participants. Many of you are actually representative of companies. And we have decided to run a little poll with a few questions just to have a better sense of your background and interest for joining this project or at least for international recruitment. So we would like to ask you to actually click on a link which will appear on your slide in a few seconds on the screen. And actually join exactly here. The link is available in the chat. So please click on it and fill up this questionnaire. It will be helpful for us then in the Q&A session to get to know you better and to take into consideration your background when asking questions to our speakers. Voila, I think we have a very busy program ahead of us. I think now our slides are working fine, very much sorry for this tactics start. And without further ado Rob, please the floor is yours. Yes, hello. Thank you Daphne. Hello everyone. Welcome to this webinar also from my side. So I have the pleasure today to introduce the match project to all of you and I have prepared some slides for this. Give me a second. There we go. Can you see my slides this stage? Yes, we can. Okay, great. So I will just take a few moments to give you the general, you know, introduction to the match project. I will not go too much into any, you know, specificities. It's just to give you an idea of what we're talking about. And as a way of introduction, I wanted to take over this slide that is actually from one of our partners, Agoria, which is the sector federation that represents the technology sector here in Belgium. And it gives a very good introduction to the context I think according to their predictions and these predictions of course are from the pre corona time. They have estimated that in Belgium there will be about 584,000 unfilled vacancies by 2030. So that is really a very impressive amount I find. And they have put together, you know, a kind of plan on how to ideally tackle this problem. Today we're going to talk mostly about the first level here that you see in the graph, which is the activation one. So it's really activating new workers. And obviously the first task there is to activate people that are not working yet and not working population. But what we are going to talk about today for this project is the second block, the 30,000 people that are being targeted to economic migration. And obviously we're looking at, you know, hiring people from outside Belgium and that is of course to some extent within the EU. But I think it is in particular also true for non-EU countries. And as you will see today, we will be looking into two African countries. So I just wanted to show you these amounts as well, because indeed we are 2020, 2030 is not that far away. And when you look at the numbers, I think for Belgium only it is already, you know, quite impressive the lack of manpower that we are facing in the upcoming years. Now for our project in particular, we are working with two countries on the African side. You have read it most probably. So there is Senegal and Nigeria, one French speaking country and one English speaking country. There's a whole number of reasons why we are working with these countries. It's an assessment that was made early on in the project development on the basis of a number of criteria. Obviously the languages are one of them. But I think also the quality of the labor in these countries is a second important indicator. And thirdly, we also wanted to make sure that there is a surplus, you know, in labor that we don't have to go, you know, and take away people that might already be active, for instance, in the local economy. So we're really looking into, you know, two countries with the big population and where we know that there are pools of especially young people that are qualified and that are also having difficulties in finding jobs in the local economy. So that's for what concerns the African side. On the European side, we're working with four countries for EU member states, the Benelux countries, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg and then Italy. In Italy in particular, we're working with one region in the north of the country. So this is from an overall perspective, the countries and the scope of the match project. Today, of course, we're going to have a discussion on the Belgian case, obviously. So the audience for today is Belgian. We are having very similar webinars being set up by our partners in the four other EU countries. So if you would be interested, you can also reach out to those. But how does it work in particular for Belgium? I'm going to walk you through now the different steps. It's a summary of the different steps, hoping to give you a good idea of how we think this thing can work. So the first phase, and that's really basically what we're doing also now today is to reach out to the private sector and to the interested companies for this kind of mobility scheme. So the first step here is that the interested companies at some point during this project provide IOM with job profiles, vacancies that they are willing to fill, and for which they are willing to explore the potential of candidates from these two African countries. Once we have those, we will move to step two. So the second step, so after we have received the vacancies from the different companies, the second step is obviously that we will go and do a kind of matching exercise, a kind of pre-selection for these companies in the two African countries. So this will be done on the basis of a pre-selection panel as we call it. It's a group of organizations that will, you know, publish the different vacancies in the African countries and that will go through the candidates as a pre-selection exercise. So these organizations involved are the VDAB in Belgium, the Flemish Public Employment Agency. IOM, obviously, our offices in both of these countries will be involved. And we hope also to have the support of the public employment agencies in Nigeria and in Senegal. And we have the support also of Alderia, the private HR company that will be supporting us with the pre-selection as well. I'm looking at the slide. I don't know if you see them. Unfortunately, we seem to have a slight technical problem. Yes, thank you. Great. This is fine now. Yes, I will continue. So once we have done the pre-selection back in Africa, we will be sharing the top five candidates for each position with the companies in Belgium. So that means, for instance, that if you are a company, you want to recruit someone, we will be sharing the top five candidates that we have identified for you for that position. If you want to hire more than one individual, then you will receive the top five for each of the profiles you are looking for. The final selection, the final recruitment is entirely the responsibility of the companies. So that's step four here. So we are not going to force you to recruit anyone. There is no obligation within this project for you to go through with the one or the other candidate. We are going to suggest candidates and it's up to you then to decide whether yes or no, you want to hire these people. So you can ask these people to do additional tests. You can invite them for interviews that's really entirely up to you. And obviously you can ask for support from the project team also with these different phases. It's important to mention that in Belgium we will be going through the single permit procedure. I'm not sure that everybody knows it, this procedure, because it's been launched only earlier this year, but it's basically a procedure that has been created in Belgium to attract qualified labour from third countries. So in principle, it is a procedure that should facilitate everything related to the work permit and the visa for third country nationals that want to work or that will be hired by Belgian companies. And then finally, we will of course assist you also through this project with everything that is related to the logistics and the preparation of these people that would be selected as well as the pre-departure training. So before they actually take the plane on the African side, we will make sure that they are trained to explain to them what the work habits are in Belgium, the number of cultural issues and the number of issues related to soft skills, etc. And the aim is really to prepare them as best as possible for the Belgian environment, the Belgian professional environment, knowing that most probably most of these people will never have been in Belgium or in Europe and therefore I think it's important indeed take some time to train them and to prepare them for this important step in their careers. Now you will have understood also that with the COVID-19 pandemic, the project plan as it initially stood will not be able to be implemented according to the same timeline. So we also want to reassure you that obviously we're not going to have anyone come over without taking into account the regulations and the restrictions concerning COVID-19 both in Belgium and in the African countries. But most probably there will be a very limited amount of physical mobility recruitment in the next few months. We will have to see when the COVID-19 pandemic allows us to go ahead with physical mobility. In the meanwhile, obviously we're looking into some alternatives, one of them being working arrangements from a distance. So there is a possibility also and we've checked this also with our partners in Africa who for instance start with hiring people for working from a distance. So you could imagine instead of having someone coming to your company in Belgium immediately you could imagine having a schedule where you say, well, let's start first working together for a number of months but from your home. And then once this whole COVID pandemic is behind us we can reassess and see what the possibilities are for physical mobility. So we will have to take into consideration these elements. I think throughout the project it's very difficult at this stage to put dates on these elements. But we are following up very closely and we will make sure that indeed we respect all restrictions and regulations related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A slide on what is in it for the companies. Participating companies, what would be the benefits of participating in this scheme. I think the most straightforward one is the low cost. So that's what you see here. There are no fees to join the program. There is also no fee to actually launch a selection process. So from that perspective, in a way you could say that the project subsidizes a little bit the recruitment process. Second, we are looking into qualified professionals. So we are really looking into people that would match the needs and the vacancies that we are confronted with in Belgium. And as you've seen in my first slide, we're talking about the technology sector. We're talking about IP. We're talking about digitalization, engineering, energy and so forth. So it's really mostly qualified professionals. And we will be really looking into the pools of qualified youngsters in these two African countries to try to match the needs that we identify here on the Belgian side. We will have to be flexible and we are flexible all in all to this mobility scheme. There are no recruitment obligations. There are no quota. Also the duration of the job placement is really depending on the needs of the company. Some companies might go for a short duration, nine months to one year. Some others might immediately go for a timing of two years. The whole idea is that we stay within that branch of nine months to two years. And then it's up to the company after that initial job placement within this project to decide do I want to continue with this individual or do we stop here, which would then in that case mean that the individual goes back to his country of origin. I think it's an opportunity also to operationalize the diversity strategy of companies and more particularly the diversity at the workplace. So a lot of companies have a policy, have a strategy related to diversity at the workplace. I think by participating in a scheme such as this one, it is actually a nice opportunity also to put that in practice and even to test some of the elements in the strategy. We will be also focusing within this project on intercultural competence and ethical recruitment. So we have quite some knowledge and expertise on that. So we could indeed also assist the companies with, for instance, elements on ethical recruitment. And then again, ethical recruitment in third country. So it would be focusing on Africa. So at IOM we have quite some expertise on that that we are willing to share also throughout this project. And then finally, I think it's the last one in the list here, but it's a quite important one. I think it's really an occasion also for companies to discover the potential of Africa. We know from previous projects that the companies that participate in such teams often, you know, are interested by Africa, are hesitating to invest or setting up projects in Africa. And we've seen that by participating in such a project that very often, you know, you encounter indeed these individuals. You integrate them in your teams and then these allow you indeed to take also next steps for what concerns, you know, your investments, your potential investment in Africa. So I would say that's also a very, very important one. I moved into the next slide and this is a slide that gives you an overview of what is expected from you as an employer. So we've listed here a number of things. The first one is related to the employment conditions. So as you might know, under the single permit procedure, there are some conditions that the companies need to apply. And one of them obviously is that you need to be working with the Belgian working contract for these individuals and with a corresponding salary. So there are some criteria for the salary, you know, in the regulation. And the idea is that the salary is indeed aligned to what a similar an individual with similar qualifications would indeed earn in Belgium as well. Second point is that of course, the employed, you will be the persons will be employed according to the job descriptions that you have shared with us, you know, initially. So if you're looking for an engineer, well, then it's also obviously expected that this person will be performing tasks of an engineer once this person has been recruited. We expect you to invest in human capital. It's quite straightforward, but I think it's important to mention it anyway. So obviously it's a lot of on the job training that we expect from you. It's kind of integrating these people into your activities into your teams. And by doing that, of course, the idea is that these people would be trained and would be allowed also to develop their skills. If there are external trainings that are relevant for these individuals or even needed for them to be able to perform their tasks. I think it would be nice also to allow them to enroll in these trainings and we can look at that together because we know that with our partners. There are quite some trainings out there. So it's a matter of identifying the right ones and then seeing, you know, whether these individuals would benefit of enrolling in such a training. Throughout the whole project, we will of course be monitoring the whole situation. So imagine that you as a company, you hire someone, we will then, you know, at some point in time ask you, you know, how's it going? Are you happy with this individual? How would you rate, you know, the performance of this individual? What could have been done better? Would you do it again, etc. So we will come back to you with these kind of questions to make sure that the things are running as smoothly as possible. And in case of problems also that we would be able to identify them and maybe help you with those problems. And obviously, we would do the same with the migrants, right, with the African talent. So we would also ask them, you know, how is it going in your company? Are you satisfied? Are you learning a lot of new things, etc. Finally, we will encourage these young African talents also to engage, for instance, with the existing diaspora organizations here in Belgium. We know that for Nigeria and Senegal, there's a quite active diaspora here in Belgium. A lot of these diaspora organizations are supporting projects, development projects in their home country, etc. And so we will be looking into possibilities for synergies there as well. And we really hope that the companies that we engage with would also support, you know, these kind of ideas of, you know, besides, of course, the main task of, you know, working within the company on the specific job, having also the possibility to engage, you know, in diaspora related projects that would, you know, benefit also their countries of origin. So that's something that is a bit still to be defined also based on a little bit on a case by case basis. But I think it's an interesting idea also and we hope to explore the possibilities of such synergies as well. Voila. I think that I went through the main, you know, expectations from you as an employer. I want to close with an overview of the team here in Belgium. So as mentioned, we have different project partners on board for what concerns the Flemish Chamber of Commerce, VOCA. We are particularly working with VOCA in West Flanders and East Flanders, where we know that the needs for labour are the highest. And we have our partners, Davy and Els, representing those two provinces. Then for the Flemish Employment Agency, we have Lenka, who's also on board. Daphne, you've heard already earlier on, she's the project manager on behalf of IOM. For Agoria, we have Jérône Fonson, who's our contact point. And then we are working also with the Chamber of Commerce for the Brussels region, BC, and there our contact person is Vincent Delanois. I want to close with my last slide just to tell you that we are also developing a little bit of visual and communication material. We are happy to share that with you so that if you want within your companies or within your partner network, share some information on this initiative or have discussions internally on whether to join this or not. We have, for instance, developed a brochure. This is what it looks like. I think it's a four-page brochure. And I just wanted to share with you that you find some key data in that brochure as well and that this will be made available, you know, by the end of this webinar. We can send you paper formats, electronic formats, in case that would be needed, in case you would wish to have some material. So, voilà. I think that is it, you know, in a nutshell from my side. I think I can close here and I really look forward to receiving also your questions during the Q&A. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Rob, for this very detailed overview. And thank you to all the participants for their patience for a little technical mishaps. But here we go. This is the reality of the lockdown and of having to meet you all through digital means. Cédric, without further ado, we would like to actually discuss with you the activities of Aldelia. So it would be good to introduce yourself briefly, but also to dive immediately into the topic of today, which is your recruitment methodology. So please take the floor as yours. Definitely. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm calling you from sunny London at the moment. So in a few words, Aldelia, I will pass very quickly if you have some questions, I will leave my email on the chat. I've set up Aldelia at 15 years ago in London. We have a huge focus of Africa around human capital, and we are specialized in recruitment services from top middle management to trading labors and various services, various sectors. But we do also all the outsourcing management of the manpower for clients from contract of employment, payroll, taxes, immigration, medical insurance and suspension from A to Z. We work for companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Ein, Ken, Total, Exxon, Cisco, Fujitsu, et cetera, et cetera, could be big companies, but also pan-African companies, SMEs and more and more fintech companies. You've seen our presence 12 countries, both English, French and Portuguese speaking countries, and usually experienced, for example, in Nigeria, we just celebrated Evan's anniversaries of presence in Nigeria and five years in Senegal. Just to give you an idea, last year we've done $15 million turnover in Nigeria. So that's for Aldelia and why we've managed to survive sometimes over these years is because we've had a very, very straight, strict approach in terms of selection. You know, in Africa, you will have access to a huge number of hungry, desperate, talented people. So first of all, we have the identification phase and the test and the assessment and then the shortlist. In terms of candidates identification, where do we find or candidates or talents that will be of interest for you is on the own database on the diaspora we found in West Africa, but outside West Africa as well wants to return. We've got our local recruitment teams as well in countries both in Nigeria and in Senegal, with their own network, all contact and own database locally through local advertising, headhunting network. Word of Mark is Africa. In Africa, it's very, very important, very strong, but also the social networks are very, very, very strong, very use the WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and so on and so on works a lot into recruitment. And recently, we had to develop the digital aspect because when you have to check to read to assess thousands of CVs, you cannot do it manually. So we've developed the Arriba job platform, which is a matching platform, automatic matching platform. So that's that to help to do the candidate identification, centralization. And then once we have the pool of candidate we move into the test and the assessment side. That means one even if we receive five 10,000 application even 100. We have the capabilities to do automatic matching with Arriba jobs with artificial intelligence, but also with the fact that we are giving tests to pass to the candidate to the talents. It could be soft skills could be technical skills, whatever we decide with the client in order to funnel from 100,000 to 10s or units. And then once we have identified these people, and that we made sure that what's on the CVs is matched with test results, because the tests are timed and registered fined. So we just want to make sure that the right person with attending the test. And then we finalize, we organize a face to face or video at the moment, interview to assess both the soft skills, motivation, but also sometimes the technical skills. And once we have done the first and second interview, then we go into the shortlist, and that's where you will receive the short, 235 candidates proposition will be not really assessed, but that you will be assessing them with your own criteria is both technical and personal HR based on your HR policies within you within your company. Sorry to interrupt. I hope you hear me well. Yes, yes, you do. I think that's before going further into a conversation. I would just need to ask kindly the participants that are representative from a private company to actually contribute to our life poll because we had very few answers so far. But actually I can see that many participants have joined since the the beginning of this of this webinar and maybe they're not aware that we're running a poll. It would be I think very helpful for us for our Q&A session to get a better understanding of your of your background. Actually, let me make a link with my second question, as you have really, I think clarify for us the key steps for your selection process. I think let me ask you something blunt, but we often understand from from companies working in in the field that recruitment process unfortunately might actually suffer from from some external interference. This is this is really something quite difficult that many companies seems to to experience. So, can you just in a few words, explains to the participants, how do you make sure that the recruitment is fair and complies with with ethical standards. Okay, that's a very important question. And in terms of compliance and ethical, there's several things. First one to reply to your to your answer about how can we react when we've got a local partner local authorities or some someone who wants to interfere with the recruitment in proposing his nephew, his son, his neighbor for political or whatever reason, very simple through the test, you know, we are able to test the people so if someone wants to go into the recruitment process, he goes, he goes into the recruitment process in goes into the testing aspects of the of the process, and then he gets a ranking. If it's good for what we want him to do, we will propose him a job. However, if it doesn't reach the minimum that we've decided we are with our clients, we can explain with information with data that this specific person didn't reach this minimum for this specific job. However, we could have other opportunities in other sectors, like this, we give back to the sponsor of these candidates is fantastic candidates, something to explain to the one who has pushed his own CDs. In this case, we can document and the results test doesn't doesn't lie and it's an independent one. So it's working very well. In terms of compliance, this is key, you know, this is very important and this is why we've been in Africa 15 years and still up and running, because we have both local regulation, and we anticipate the change the moves with being compliant with international standards and regulations. This is very important. We'll talk about GDPR later on. It's not because there is no GDPR regulation in Africa that you cannot. We need to comply. Discrimination is very important. We cannot discriminate anyone. You know, we can think that there is a lot of discrimination in Africa. I can tell you today in terms of gender at Africa, the 50% of the Aldelia staff in Africa are women. 50% of the country managers and we've got 12 countries operating and soon 14 50% of the country manager of the managers are women. So that works. And this is possible. What is important is ethic as well. Now we are talking about the candidate that will come back on it, but the employers as well. We need to make sure and we are making sure that the employers are fair employers that there is a background check on employers making sure that they pay the people on time the taxis and so on and so on. On the talent side, we are testing them once again, very important, but we do background check, police check. We call back the previous employers and we make sure that's what's on the CVs. And it's what was what has happened. And once again, we don't charge talents. Okay, unfortunately for our friend at the, the webinar if you need all services, you will be charged. We don't know that, but we need to be profitable to make sure that we can survive on the continent and carry on delivering the best services. So we don't charge the talents. In terms of what's written for us, what is what doesn't what's not written doesn't exist. So all the contract to pension the insurance and people in Africa are managed like if we were managing people in Europe, this is very, very important. And we've got a support to them. When they have any problem, you know, and because sometimes details makes a difference when they could use because they want to be paid later earlier they need a loan or they've got a question for the medical insurance because the child is sick. So responding very quickly avoid lots of issues, strikes, difficulties and so on and so on. So that's how we manage the ethical aspect and the compliance aspect of our job in Africa. Thank you very much. I think we will have time during the Q&A to go through your tips for companies that are considering hiring young talents, but I would like now to turn to Ernesto, Ernesto from the company Tunga. Maybe you would like to introduce yourself briefly and explain us why you're interested in this in this topic. Sure, thanks. So my name is Ernesto Speldt and I'm the founder of Tunga. So we founded the company in 2015. And basically what we do is that we have a pool of software programmers in various African countries. And the pool is about 350-400 developers and they work through us for companies in Europe and the United States. And how it works is that we recruit the developers to enter our platform. We test them thoroughly in a similar fashion that Cedric also described just now. And once the company has a need for a developer, they send us a profile and then, let's say, because we've already got them all in the database and we have them already tested, etc. We send candidates immediately and the candidates usually can start working, let's say within a week or something like that, so very quickly. But they work remotely through us, right? So the candidates usually, when we provide service, are not relocated to Europe, but they work from Africa, their own country, either from home or from a go-working space or something like that. They work for the clients. And Ernesto, there is a question that we often get from companies. I would say that for the IT, ICT sector, you have countries like India that are really well known. So why would you advise a company to work with talents from Nigeria or Senegal? Why are they interested as source countries? Well, if you look at within Africa, there is a number of countries that have English as a native language in Senegal. It's French, so obviously if you were a French speaker, that's an advantage. And English proficiency is really well. It's the same time zone. And the fees are, say, competitive. So if you look at the salary levels, and there's just a huge untapped pool of developers there that just didn't get on the market yet. So it's a little bit unexplored territory, but if you know how to go around, then you have relatively easy access to very good developers. And precisely, what would be your advice? What are the key success factors and what are the pitfalls in working in these countries today? That's a very good question. Well, first of all, maybe to illustrate, because I don't know what is the, a lot of potential customers that we talked to, they really have no idea what the African landscape looks like, right? But there is a number of countries that have really a thriving tech scene, among which Nigeria and Senegal. So you see a huge growth of tech hubs, et cetera, et cetera. And with that comes a lot of professionals that just have good technical skills, good programming skills. In my opinion, when it goes wrong, it's usually not because of the lack of skills, because that's easily easy to establish also early on whether someone has the technical skills to be successful. The big risk is what we call soft skills, or at least where there is the cultural differences, right? So a lot of the people work for us, and people who are on the market, they are either, at least for a significant part, they are self-taught, whether they were on university or not. But a lot of these problems, because this knowledge evolves very quickly, so you have to be able to be self-taught, et cetera, et cetera. But learning how to function in a team with people from another country who you never met, et cetera, it's quite challenging, right? So you really have to make sure that you create an environment for the developer. And I'm talking now, once again, about the remote working, right? The remote working one, for them to be successful. So first of all, this starts with, yet you have to check beforehand what is a soft skill. So we have a number of tests for that to see, okay, how do they communicate, how did they manage tasks, how do they deal with deadlines, et cetera, et cetera. How do they deal with certain problems that regularly arise in a remote work setting? So let's say prevention is the best. So once we've established, okay, these skills are good and they're there, then it's very important to set clear rules of engagement, right? Because you cannot expect for someone who is in another country from another culture, et cetera, to know how you would like to have things done best, right? Every company is different, every company is different procedures. So you have to be very clear about what are the rules of engagement, how do you want to cooperate, et cetera. And within that, I find that it's much more helpful to steer on output as opposed to steering on the process. How do you mean? Well, if you have workers, let's say in your office, then it's rather easy and also normal, let's say, to keep an eye on them and to make sure everyone is there within working hours and that kind of stuff. When it's remote, it's much more about do you have productivity that I want from you or do you have the output that I hired you for, right? So the discussion is much more about, okay, when will you have what chunk of work done and not so much about, okay, and what hours will you work on it? Although it's very important to agree on communication rules, so when should you be reachable? How long do we think it's acceptable to, let's say, to give a response within a certain time, et cetera? You have to have clear rules for that, but you should not try to police the person on the other side in terms of see what is he doing now, et cetera. You should just make sure that you have a solid meeting rhythm, a solid reporting rhythm. So for example, with us, all the developers who work for us, they get a daily mini survey where they report on quality and progress of the work so that we have kind of an early warning system that we can see, okay, something is not going right there if it happens. So that's what I mean by that. Thank you. Thank you for that, Ernesto. I think you've pointed out quite a few interesting things that maybe we will want to discuss further during the Q&A with our participants. But let me ask you a last question. As Rob pointed out in his presentation, obviously with the current COVID-19 pandemic, distance working arrangement look very attractive. Now, is there any costs or legal obligations or anything like that that company should be aware of? What type of costs you are thinking about? Any type of, you know, a hidden cost that company would not be aware of or legal problems that could, you know, be a trick to them. I mean, is there anything that you would like to warn the companies about because of course, I mean, this market is booming, you have lots of service providers, but what would be your advice to them? Well, if you go through a service provider like us, you don't have those problems because you just have a contract with a service provider, right? But if you would say, okay, I want to have a contract directly with the employee in that country, then you would have to dive into, okay, what are your tax obligations? What is normal salary level there? What rules should I adhere to, right, to create this working environment? Then there's payment costs. So to get the money there, it requires some setting up some infrastructure to be able to make the payments, etc. And that's actually quite expensive. We pay a lot of financial fees for transferring money, etc. So, you know, but it's not impossible. It's just if you're serious about it and it's for the long term, it's probably worth the effort. If it's more like short term or you don't know yet or you want to try it out, it's probably more easy to go through a service provider that has the infrastructure for that. Thank you very much Ernesto again for this very comprehensive presentation. I think that before actually opening the floor to the participants for questions and please do not hesitate to actually ask your questions through the chat function. Maybe Nelson, you would like to introduce us with the outcome of our poll. Do we have more information about who is in the room with us today? Is there any interesting outcome? So yes, good afternoon everybody. So has the private sector representative filled the poll could see. We asked you a few questions to better understand a bit who is in the call today with us. So we had the six responses that give us a sample of the people that are joining us today. We have companies that are very well balanced between companies who have non-U citizen working for them and those who do not. So I would say that there is already quite quite some experience in recruiting also from third countries here. And we can also see that there are companies that recruit from Africa, as well as companies that work with Asian nationals so from countries in Asia and in South America. And you can also see that the majority of the respondents do have an ethical recruitment or diversity policy in place in their company. I would like to stress that we're talking about Belgian companies so we specifically asked people working in multinationals to focus on their office in Belgium. We also asked whether their company currently have a plan to invest or start activities in Nigeria and Senegal or if they already have. And we can see that yes, two people either have plans or already have two companies apology. Do have activities or plan to have activities in both countries. So both Senegal and Nigeria. We have two companies that currently do not have either plans or activities in the two countries to which we can add other two that answered a simple no to the question. And then the last interesting element we also wanted to know whether the participants already had activities also in other African countries so to broaden a bit the scope of the scope also of our discussion. And we can see that we have one company who has activities in Ethiopia. One company that has activity in South Africa, one in Togo and one in Tunisia. So I think this is a this is a good sample of our participants and I think we can also start our discussion on the basis of the data we collected here. Thank you very much Nelson for for that and indeed I find that it's always interesting to know who is with us in in in the room. And as we were preparing this this discussion with our colleagues from Vodka from bestie so the chambers of of commerce here in in in Belgium. The point was to say yes of course there is an interest yes of course. This is probably the way to go, but companies here in Belgium are a little bit on hold, because of the COVID-19 crisis. We see also that companies are fighting literally for their survival. So I would like to abuse my position as a moderator and take the privilege to ask you the first question to you Ernesto and Cedric. What is the real impact of the of this crisis on your respective activities, the impact let's say on the pace and the volume of your activities, but also maybe on the on the nature even Ernesto. Well, in one sense is a little bit early to say so I'm curious how I would answer this question six months from now. But we are a very fast growing company so we have been doubling our growth in the past four years so each year we grow 100%. And that growth at this moment has stalled over the past month right so it's kind of like the whole speed out of the company. Because you see that a lot of potential customers they just put everything on hold. Right. But I also can see because this was especially the first two weeks like the second half of March. Existing customers almost all of them they just stayed the course so in that sense no impact. And I can also see the pipeline filling up again. So you can see so after the first shock companies are making plans again and I think that we see you know where where we had clients or leads in hospitality related sectors. Yes, those are in trouble and there's but on the other hand there we see also new sectors rising like health and education etc where the demand actually is growing. So in that sense I'm optimistic. We do see that there is less scarcity on the Dutch market at least for software developers. But I think that it seems to be more like a temporary thing because I don't think that the whole scarcity dissolved all of a sudden. It's just that you got a lot of movement of people for example with KLM the airline they relieve like 15,000 it specialist from one day to the other. Yes, so now they have to replace but I think when all this does has settles then we still will have scarcity. And then there is I think a number of advantages of working with African developers over working with locals in any case so I don't think that market will disappear whatever happens. All together I would say the impact it's in the short term it's just negative but it's not as it is in other sectors right there's no disaster. And in the longer term probably it will stall growth a little bit for us but I don't. But I think we still think that we're going to grow 50% or something like this year if I look at the pipeline right now. And you said how do you see things. Okay, on our side we've seen reduce of activities the first two three weeks in some sectors, mainly in gas, not linked to COVID-19 or maybe the reducing of the economy but the short the price of the barrel. You know so a barrel at $20 means some projects we just stopped on the other sectors I can tell you that between end of mid March and the end of June would have recruited 200 people in Africa. So we can see some traction. We can see some existing project carrying on. We can see some new project going in. So we add we speak as we speak we are putting two more countries in Africa, one in Egypt one in Tunisia on top of the 12 we are having. So, yes, we might not reach the numbers we've planned before this crisis for 2020. However, we will keep the level of activities and we will grow a little bit, not maybe as much but we will grow. So happy, happy with that it will be even more ready for 2021 or end of 2021 it will start again. So I've got no issues about that. So there is light at the end of the tunnel when I hear the two of you, but we have questions now coming from the audience and let me maybe pick up one that often comes to our conversation with with companies. Could you please elaborate a bit more on the on the profile and the education level in particular in the in the IT. For instance, which kind of programming language language is is available. And are these people only competent just to execute tasks or do they do they also offer competence to solve problems. Maybe you and then Ernesto. That's a very, very common question and it's very interesting question. I can, I can tell you today that's every day every week I'm amazed by the level of candidates I am, I am receiving. You know, there is more MIT graduating Nigeria than maybe both French France and Belgium. You know, it's not about who we can find, you know, which kind of languages we can find in Nigeria. It's more, tell me which version of Java you want to recruit and how many of them do you want, and then we will be able to find them. So, these people are very hungry to learn, they are very, very good. If you look at the numbers and we're discussing this in another webinar. So, if you look at the population of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, 27 million people that the population of Lagos, Lagos so one city. And the average age in terms of working population is 44 years old in Europe is 18 years old in Nigeria. We've got a large population of qualified people in terms of percentage might be smaller than Europe, but in terms of number, it's much, much bigger. So, you've got great people that are very entrepreneurial, they are very dynamic and believe me, they take lots of decision, you know, you need to canalize their energy. And they're not only doers, they are great, great entrepreneurs and great, great people. And if I might add on that, and I think the question is more specific, I believe that the participants are interested to really understand how do you manage to test the skills? How do you manage to really assess objectively the level of qualifications? Ernesto. So, first, if I may add on what Cedric says, because it's a very important point in my experience and I also used to work with IT people in the Netherlands, let's say. But in the Netherlands, IT people generally they're actually quite uncommunicative, right? So they're more like technical nerds, if you will, who have a certain mindset. In Africa, I meet a lot more people for whom this is really an opportunity to improve their lives. So their whole mindset is different, much more entrepreneurial, as Cedric says, much more eager, no prima donna behavior, right? So actually, for me, it's much more fun to work with African IT people than Dutch. It's just a general comment on that. And so in terms of how do you test, we have a whole range of tests that we use, depending on what we want to test for. So a lot of tests are just standardized knowledge tests, right? So it could be multiple choice, it could be them solving a coding problem and then we can make screen recording. You can even see how they move around, et cetera, et cetera, how long they take. So you can go very in depth for the technical skills. And we have, because that's also the question, what languages, we have every popular framework and language is available on the market here. And you have, obviously, of course you have juniors who are not so good yet, but you also have a lot of meteors and a lot of seniors. So it's just depending on what you need. And so I think our follow up questions, as we've received quite a few now, sorry for interrupting you. We have here, actually, if I can recognize the name, a colleague from Enable, Enable is the development, the Belgium Development Agency. That is asking, I think, a question to the links to the first question that we've discussed, which is a brain drain issue. So of course we are all, you know, eager to meet the needs of the companies. But what about the development back in those source countries? How do we make sure that we do not harm these countries more than we help by setting up such program? Well, I can only speak for myself. So for my company, because one reason that we don't relocate as a company that developers to Europe is because of this. So we don't want to relocate them. And I know that within your program, they also are going to relocate it back, etc. So this is one thing. Other thing is that we invest in the pool, right? So we have training programs. And we're training at this moment, I think, 200 developers. We have a program where we train 125 developers offline. So this is in actual classes. And then we have an online e-learning environment, which is just live. So we're just launching it, but we're going to expand very quickly. So what happens with us, you get tested and then you can get, you can define improvement areas, right? So when you fill a test, we're not just sent away. We send you to the testing platform or to the learning platform, etc. So that you can improve your skills. So for us, it's very important. And this is all no strings attached. We provide this for free. And they're also not obliged to work through us after that, etc. So we recognize the importance of also investing in the pool, right? And our philosophy is if we invest in the pool, what goes around comes around. You know, we work with the developers that we want to work with, but there's also, you know, enough investment in skills for other markets, local markets, etc. And Rob, maybe before giving the floor to Cedric, will our mobility scheme actually fuel BrainDrain? And how can we address that within the context of the MATCH project? Yeah, I think it's really a very, very good question. So it's something that we will need to see now. We know also from previous experience similar projects, you know, that for instance, not all of these migrants will be staying in Belgium. So under the hypothesis that COVID will be behind us and that people will physically move to Belgium. The whole idea of the project is obviously that it's a job placement for a fixed term. And then it's really up to the company and the migrants who decide whether this can be pro-launched or not. We know from experience that not everybody will be staying. So a lot of people will also be returning to their country of origin. And we obviously hope that they will be returning with an increased set of skills, right? So that's one thing that I wanted to add. We know also from previous experience that the companies generally that are interested on the European side, you know, to participate, very often already have somewhere in the back of their mind an idea of what they want to do in Africa. Some of them, you know, want to invest. Some others are setting up a project. Some are working with a partner. You know, there's a big variety of reasons, you know, why companies, you know, hire these people. But we have seen from previous projects that the vast majority ends up very often, you know, working with these individuals back in the country of origin. So that could be, for instance, that they then hire these individuals in their local office in that country, or that they hire these people to work on a specific project or with a partner, or that these individuals become, you know, commercial representatives for a region or for a country in Africa. These kind of stories we have seen that in previous projects. And so we truly believe that it's also, you know, by working with these companies that are interested in Africa, that there is also an added value that is generated, you know, for the African economies. Now for what concerns the purely individual element, the whole thing is of course, the whole ambition is of course not to go and take away, you know, staff that are working in established companies in Nigeria or Senegal, because that would really be, you know, hampering the development of these companies and the local economy. And that's also, I think, quite throughout this whole discussion we've been having today. We've been really also focusing on younger graduates, right? So we're really also looking into this big pool and I think it's been highlighted. It's a huge amount of young people, the average age is way lower than in Europe. But this big pool of young people, you know, that are graduating, about to graduate, just graduated, that are, you know, training themselves, you know, in tech hubs, etc. This is really also our core target audience, I think, in the African countries. It doesn't exclude, of course, that there's people, you know, with some experience that could participate. But I think that we keep our focus, you know, on that group and that in that sense we try to limit, you know, as much as possible any brain drain. Definitely back to you. Yes. Sorry, I did mute myself. So the conversation was not us through it. And Cedric, just maybe a final word on that and maybe we can take the other questions as well. Yes. You know, quickly, Ernesto and Rob covered it very well. You know, first of all, we never dry the number of people and talents in Africa. Every year 20 million people arrive on the job market, 20 million people. So it is also an example to others to see that some talents can go to Europe, get trained, come back, even if some stays, why not? You know, so there will be the big brother or big sister of others. So I think it's important and this kind of program are very important. That will drive by leadership, you know, and qualification. So there's no brain drain and we are, you know, ethical to not to do it anyway. So there's a control from both Ernesto and myself were facing it on the daily basis. Cedric, maybe the next question is also relevant for you. Actually, we have a participant that is asking how do you actually work with the public employment agencies? So if you'd like to expand on that. Oh, yes. Yes. I thought it was the other question on the client. I was ready to share my screen again. But I know you like to challenge me, Daphne, so that's fine. For the agencies, it's very important to work with them. You know, they're called public agencies, public employment agencies. It's not exactly the same services you can expect that the one we have in Europe. So sometimes we have to partner, we have to support, we have to train, we have to do for them. But we work on their side. We involve them sometimes on the recruitment, especially sometimes we have to justify that we have to recruit experts because we couldn't find local training off. And that will be, I will come back on it because some companies will like to have local people at management level or technical level, but don't find the local skills. So we involve these agencies to identify to map the market and to show that there is some shortage of skills as well in Africa. And what we can do to partner as well with universities to train the trainers in order to match the needs of our clients. And I think you were talking about brain drain, but it could be a brain feed as well. Because even companies who have operation in Africa could recruit African talents, African young engineers or technicians. Bring them to Europe in order to train them to take more responsibilities in their own plans in their own services to represent them back in Africa to develop their business. So for me, this program address three, three type of people, the companies who doesn't have business in Africa and the one was business in Africa for the one who don't have business in Africa. They can recruit fantastic new clients, new, sorry, new talents who will bring them new culture, new dynamism, different way of thinking, different skills as well. And the skills they need and they cannot find in Europe. And then they keep the talents in Europe. Then there is the one who doesn't have business in Africa and are willing to do business in Africa. And then you can recruit someone in Africa, train them in your processes, tools, services, and then bring them back to Africa to expand to scale up your own business in Africa, whether it's Niger or Senegal. And the third part is the one who have business in Africa and doesn't have the whole skills in Africa to train people. And that's where you can take African people, train them in Europe, bring them back to give them more management, technical responsibilities. Very important. So as we are reaching the end of this webinar, we have still have a few questions, but I think that are more directly to the match project. So Rob, maybe you can take these questions. So actually our participants would like to know whether the young talents will already have the linguistic skills. And if not, if we will train them in our pre-departure orientation sessions, then obviously there is another interesting question which probably Cedric and Ernesto know well as well, which is the different cultural background that those young talents have, which might actually create some tension back in the workplace in Belgium. And are we planning to offer some sort of intercultural training or help companies to really create an inclusive environment to help the soft lending of those young workers? And the last question from the audience is, in our previous experience, have we already developed similar mobility schemes with other countries in Africa? And in such a case, did small and medium companies join the program or are these programs mainly open to, let's say, the big players, multinationals and large groups? Rob, I think you may want to answer that first. Yeah, I will go very, very rapidly and then I can give the floor to the other speakers as well. So for what concerns the language skills, no, there is no language training before departure for the selected candidates. But as I explained, we are looking at people who speak fluently English or French, Nigeria or Senegal. And there is, of course, a possibility to enroll these people in language courses once they are in Belgium. You can look into that, you know, with our different partners here in Belgium. Potentially, you could also ask, you know, interested people, people that you would be interested in hiring also to enroll in online language skills before departure. So that option exists, but it's not a mandatory step within the overall match project. The second question related to their cultural habits, the cultural background, I think it's very, very important to recognize that this is probably the main challenge in this whole type of mobility scheme. We've seen in previous projects that indeed in terms of technical competences, the candidates quite well match the expectations of the companies on the European side. However, for what concerns more the cultural soft skills elements, there is a quite significant gap between the expectations and, let's say, you know, the habits of the candidates. So we really want to work on that. I think it's very important in the pre-selection process to keep that in mind as well. I think it's very important that we look for people that have the right attitude and attitude is not just, you know, habits and cultural elements. We are looking for people, you know, that want to invest in their CVs and their careers that want to be part of this and that want to do all of this for also the right reasons. We've had cases in previous projects indeed where there was a complete mismatch at that level and where we had to send people back to Africa, you know, after one or two weeks in Belgium. So we need to take that into consideration, I think, also in the pre-selection. And second, indeed, we need to prepare these people. So I mentioned it in my presentation, this pre-departure training is exactly on this. That's one thing, but we are very conscious that habits will not change from one week to the other. So even if you give them a one week training, not everything will be solved with that. So we are also looking into assisting the companies that will be hosting these individuals with some, you know, trainings, you know, guidance on intercultural dialogue, integration of these people, etc. There's a number of things that already exist. And I think for companies that have notes that don't have the habit, you know, of hiring Africans. I think it's probably good that we also have a chat with them and see whether there is a need for these kinds of assistance. So we will be working both on the side of the migrants, but also on the side of the European companies if that would be required, because it's needs driven. It's not systematic. It's only in case the companies would ask us to do that. Then for what concerns the size of the companies, I think from previous experiences, we see that it's quite diverse. Very often the big multinationals, they know their way to Africa. They know their way to international recruitment. They have their processes. So they don't often need this type of project, you know, to, you know, enlighten them. Nevertheless, there's always big companies, you know, interested as well. But very often I see a lot of SMEs as well. So smaller companies, sometimes even companies that have never, you know, recruited internationally that have no direct link with Africa at this stage. But that might, you know, in the future build up something, you know, on the African continent. So I think all in all, it's probably a very mixed group and there could be a potential interest from the different companies, different sectors, different sizes. So I think for me, I leave it here and I'm happy to hand over the floor to compliment, you know, from the side of the other speakers. Ernesto or Derek? One minute each as we're really beyond schedule. Okay. If I can take just this one, I will share one last screen. And it's maybe to show you the interest of working in Africa. This is just a next track and it's not exhaustive of the client we've been working in the last six months. And this needs to be added because we have two, three new more clients on the continent. That means, if you have these clients in Europe, you're delivering your services to these clients, you can deliver it to them in Africa. You can, and they will be very happy to have you next to them. And these clients, even if some of them are massive, sometimes when they go to a new country in Africa, they are small as SME, they are SME, they start with one person. So just to show you the potential, the clients you are, you have in Europe or in Africa or will be in Africa. So that's very interesting and I wanted to share this with all the attendees. Ernesto, would you like to share some thoughts? Yeah, very briefly because I don't have to add too much. I can just say our clients are almost exclusively SMEs. So that's our focus market. And we find that, you know, the fact we can onboard them affordably, flexibly and very quickly developers lands well. The process is very lightweight. So for us that fits well. And a lot of the entrepreneurs are also, you know, quite open to creative solutions, which this is one for them because they have alternatives. So we focus on Africa, but the clients obviously not right so far. But for them, this is an interesting option usually. But for me, it's SMEs mostly. I would like to thank you so much for actually these excellent presentations and answering the questions of the audience. I can see that there are a few questions that we were not able to cover during this webinar. I can see questions, for instance, about assistance to the returnees. So what about what happens at the end of the project? Maybe you will want to contact us for a follow up conversation, but just to stress that during their job placement, we will encourage our young talents to develop their own project. We will ask the company to shoulder them. We will also proactively look for companies back in Nigeria and Senegal that might be interested to hire them back. So indeed, we have sort of the reintegration as we call that process. But we will be happy to speak with you and give you further details. So please do not hesitate to reach out to us, the IOM team, the match team in Belgium, but also to our speakers of today. Siddique and Ernesto, I'm sure that you would be very glad actually to answer some of the specific questions raised by our very active audience today. So thank you very much to you all and have a very nice end of the afternoon. That's a great day.