 So, as I said, I'm Daphne, I'm the project manager of the MATCH project and I'm your moderator for this webinar today. The objective of our meeting today is really to take the time to reflect on our respective projects and to learn from experienced colleagues working in the field of labour mobility. We should reflect and ask ourselves how can we achieve our goals which are to develop schemes that are ethical, sustainable and yet business oriented, so quite a daunting task. As I think you are all aware, we've just started a very ambitious project here called the MATCH project and we aim at addressing labour market shortages in four EU member states by enabling young talents from Nigeria and Senegal to work for companies in Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Specific sectorial labour shortages have been identified, as you know, primarily in the ICT technology and digitalisation sector. So, this is our core business, but we know that there might be also other sectors that we would need to cover. Not only do we aim at addressing EU labour market shortages, but we also want to promote investment in human capital and upscale our young talent skills and increase their employability. So, this is quite of a challenge ahead of us. As we speak, we have started our project in mid-January and currently we are reaching out to potentially interested companies in the Netherlands and in Belgium and we really measure the challenges and difficulties ahead of us as we are facing particularly difficult time with the COVID-19 crisis. And actually our colleagues back in Italy and Luxembourg have temporarily put their activities on hold. In order to shoulder and enlighten us today, we have the pleasure to have our colleagues from the Digital Explorer project, Mante and Eugenia. And this Digital Explorer project has many commonalities with the MATE project as they already have successfully managed to recruit ICT specialists from Nigeria and to bring them all the way to Lithuania. So, both Eugenia and Mante will walk us through the key steps of their project with a focus on how to engage with private sector, a task which will require us to think a little bit out of the box as we as IOM are mainly used to deal with institutional stakeholders. And after this presentation, we will have the pleasure to welcome Cedric, Cedric Filet from Aldelia. Aldelia, I think most of you are familiar with this company, it's a private recruitment firm with an extensive presence in West Africa. And Cedric will focus more on the recruitment phase and explain us challenges linked to the identification of the pool of talents. When we exchange informally in view of this webinar, Cedric said that he wanted to challenge the participants and to show us not only the top of the iceberg, but also what is below the water. So we are very much willing to take up the challenge. Eugenia and Mante, please, the floor is yours. Hello everyone. I will share my slides. Right. So, so I will, I will kick off our presentation. I'm just a second. Yes, so I'll kick off our presentation. My name is Eugenia, and I'll walk you through the structure of digital explorers program. And then Mante will specifically focus on the private sector engagement. So the digital explorers is pilot project pilot mobility labor mobility project that at large is focusing on knowledge exchange between two buzzing ICT markets, which is Lithuania and Nigeria. Lithuania is currently positioning itself very successfully as a fintech center of Europe. We have a fast growing ICT market and Nigeria is one of the most fastest growing ICT market in Africa. And therefore we, we found this connection between the two countries, even if it's if at first it might seem quite unexpected. So in a nutshell, our digital explorers program is a one year career advancement program that takes Nigerian ICT specialists who already have some experience in some tech skills in coding. We take them to Lithuania to work. So it's a paid employment to work in the selected local companies for one year. And alongside, they have skills enhancement program. We also try to encourage as much as we can network building between the two ICT markets. So as to encourage more companies to look into hiring Nigerian talents or African talents in general, but also create more business connections between Lithuania and Nigeria. So, I want to talk a bit about who are in the in the consortium of our project. So we have five different stakeholders representing both public sector, for example, Enterprise Lithuania is a government institution, which is responsible for export and support of small and medium sized companies in Lithuania, among other things. Then we have Code Academy, which is our technical partner. They are mainly working in the recruitment stage. They help us to validate technical skills of the candidates. But also right now when the when Nigerian ICT specialists are already in Lithuania, they are in charge of the skills enhancement program that is trainings that we provide for the Nigerians. Then there is diversity development group is they are migration experts. So their role is to to look at all the migration side of the of the project also to analyze the context in Lithuania to look at similar projects to for the lessons that were previously learned. So they are our migration support. Then there is Ventures platform, and this is our local partner in Nigeria. They are both, they have a nonprofit arm within their structure that works with skills and entrepreneurs. They're also an investment fund that focuses on ICT startups. So they're well positioned within the whole Nigerian ICT infrastructure to be the local representative of this project. And then there is Africa, which is us, myself and Mantia and our colleagues. And we are sort of the glue that brings everybody together. We are the brain and the engine behind the project. So we are we are managing the stakeholders making sure that expectations are met on all sides. And of course, our primary job is to work with private sector in Lithuania engage the private sector also work with institutions awareness and so on. So, like, we really have a big chunk of the project in our hands and I'm happy that we're able to share our knowledge with you today. So, want to run through quickly structure and sort of a timeline of the of the project that we have. This is, this is a rather detailed structure. So we have three major parts within the project. The first part is creating a match. So this is where all the magic happens. This is where we outreach to the ICT specialists in Nigeria. This is where we also outreach to the companies in Lithuania, and everything ends up in a in a match. And this is the most difficult and the most demanding part of the project. The second part of the project is what we call helping the match to be perfect. So this is the part where the Nigerian specialist already arrived in Lithuania. They're here for one year and there is different support that I will talk a bit about in the in one of the further slides. And the last part of the, the last stage of the project is the reintegration part or making it easier to say goodbye. So, after a year in Lithuania, the Nigerian ICT specialists, those who are not retained, they return back to Nigeria and we have a program in place to help them reintegrate, use acquired skills in the best way they can, and find relevant employment or if there's anyone interested, but there's also a possibility to have to look into the entrepreneurial sides of things. So these are like the main three stages of the of the project. And just to say where we are right now so we are right in the middle. If you look at this structure because the Nigerian ICT specialists are already in Lithuania and they have been here for half a year. So this is actually like we've passed half of the project of the timeline. I think this presentation will be shared with everyone or it will be publicly accessible so you will be able to look at the like specific components of each stage, but due to time constraints we I think we will move forward and if you have some specific questions, perhaps we can address them at Q&A. So basically there are three stages, the pre-departure stage where we create the match, integration, being in Lithuania skills enhancement, supporting for the companies, and then reintegration back in Nigeria, saying goodbye basically. I wanted to give you also an overview what what have what have we done and what have we done until now. So when we started in January 2019, we launched the application for the program in Nigeria, and we had in total 1425 applications. So what I can say quickly about this part is that we tried to do a very targeted approach. So it wasn't like a huge awareness campaign in Nigeria because we were also somewhat afraid to be overwhelmed by the number of applications. So we started targeted outreach and still we had 1425 applications. Out of all those applications we had around 150 interviews with with pre-selected candidates whose technical skills were already checked. Then 77 were selected to participate in an on-site matching exercise, which was hackathon. So this was something where we came together with representatives of the companies in Nigeria. We gathered in Nigeria, so the Nigerian ICT specialists ourselves and representatives of the companies for a week, and there were different exercises, there were trainings, but there was also a hackathon where we grouped people and they had specific challenges to work on. These were technical challenges as well. So at the end of this whole selection process we had a matching done between 15 explorers and 7 companies. And these are the ones that have arrived to Lithuania and are currently in Lithuania. And Manter will talk more about the private sector engagement and how we engage those final 7 companies. Another highlight for us or another big achievement for us because Lithuania doesn't have diplomatic representation in Nigeria and it was very important for us to figure out how we do the whole migration part. So together with our institutions, with our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we've reached a solution where a visa center was opened in Abuja and Lagos, which made it much easier for us to process documentation for visas. I don't think that would be a problem for Belgium because I know that you have your embassy there, but for our pilot project, this was indeed a very big achievement to reach that. And I'll talk briefly about the support that we provide to the explorers, so Nigerian ICT specialists, we call them explorers, digital explorers, and to the companies. So first of all, the whole migration procedures were covered by the project. So we took care of all the documentation and all the bureaucracy that pertains to that. And that was a huge incentive for the companies to join. Then we also did a lot of soft landing activities for the digital explorers. So for example, helping to find apartments, figuring out transport, giving information about shopping, phone cards, health issues, banking and so on. So there was a lot of practical support for the Nigerians arriving to Lithuania. Then right now we have continuous workplace monitoring. So we are continuously engaging with the companies. Also with the explorers to see how is it going? What are the cultural work differences they experience? What are the challenges? And we try to mediate between the companies and explorers and also be sort of cultural mediators between them managing some feedback loopholes and doing a bit of that. Cultural understanding between the two parties. And for the explorers, for the Nigerian ICT specialists, we do a lot of meetups. Larger meetups to get to know the Lithuanian wider society, but also more technical meetups where they get to know Lithuanian tech ecosystem and can do a bit of networking. So I think that gives an overview of the program. There's many specifics and Montenegro will talk more about the private sector engagement. All right. Yeah, so I'll try to dig into the peculiarities of engaging the private sector and as Daphne mentioned, it's actually very different than dealing with institutional stakeholders. And we as Africa, we always felt like we have to be this camel on being like using one type of voice to talking to institutions and a very different type of voice to talking to the private sector. So this picture is from the hackathon actually and I think this was a very big highlight for the project where we took some of the private companies that in the end we're interested in hiring explorers. And there was definitely what we call a love moment between Lithuanians and Nigerians techies. But where did we start basically just a bit of a context, how this project looked in the eyes of Lithuanians ICT sector in the very beginning. So first of all, Africa was already known for the ICT community as a stakeholder seeking to connect ICT markets of Lithuanian African countries, which means that since 2016 we had a partnership with our ministry of foreign affairs we had an annual event about ICT for development in Africa. And some of the ICT companies were like already aware of those activities, even though there are very few Lithuanian companies that work in African countries, there are a couple but it's not like a widespread or commonly known market let's see in Nigeria specifically where ICT companies operate. But there was like a growing interest and, and we had already a community of companies that knew us as this organization working in this field. We also had quite established partnership with Infovalt, which is an ICT association of Lithuania. And it was absolutely crucial stakeholder for us that helped us also work with the public institutions that supported the project and in a lot of different ways publicly in meetings and, and so on and the very key reason why they did that is because according to the study that they performed in 2018. There was an expectation by that by that by 2020 the Huanian will lack 13,000 ICT specialists. And according to their analysis there was no way that this need could be covered by internal resources like they analyzed even you know if all the students that go to study programming to universities finish the studies and start working in the Huanian ICT sector it will not be enough. Another important thing is that this project is what we call triple pilot and what Eugenia also mentioned is that you know like we don't have established relationships. We don't have institutional presence in Nigeria in a way that we don't have an embassy. So also like for the private sector it was something completely out of the box. So we had to build the trust, even though we were known you know as a as an organization that works in this field at the same time for the private sector, no matter what how how much they need ICT specialists Nigeria was definitely not the first country that they thought of you know where to look for those specialists. So this brings me to the process like how we tried to build that trust. First of all, the very key part was the language the tone we used and we invested a lot actually in branding and high quality pitch. So even the name like digital explorers and the slogans we sometimes use that connecting ICT markets to through individual journeys and so on we really tried not to make it sound as like bureaucratic. We tried to get into the ICT sector mode in a way and build the identity and I think we were quite successful with that that you know both companies and Nigerians now identify themselves as digital explorers it actually became a thing to be a digital explorer. Then we did a really widespread reaching out through different channels. What I mean is that we had like a presentation about the program about what it takes to be part of it and so on that was distributed very widely. So we use both info about enterprise Lithuania, Bonus Tech Park, which is a tech hub and other hubs and start of this you any like a lot of institutions and we name here that approximately 500 companies were reached but this is actually like a humble number. It's, it's more like what we could specifically identify that we did, but we distributed it very widely so there would be like a buzz around the program that people would know that it's happening because this is in a way also like a trust building exercise. However, I must say that this does not mean you know that if you distribute this very widely that suddenly you will get a lot of companies reaching out to you and saying yes I want to be part of it. Because this as I said sounds like something very out of the box and every single company has very different reasons why they would join it and in a generic presentation that you distribute really widely is really hard to cover those specific niche needs of the companies. So then we did what we call active outreach to selected companies and this is so we had like a short list of companies that we wanted to onboard. So we did analysis of the ICT sector of Lithuania. And the active outreach we call like personalized emails introductions we would try to find people you know that could introduce us to the CEO of that company and would vouch that this is a good thing to do. And then we moved to what we call intensive engagement where we had approximately 14 meetings so by intensive engagement we mean that okay we had this active outreach like let's say a personalized email and the company said yes okay I would like to hear more. So we managed to get 14 meetings where we came with a personalized pitch basically thinking what could be interesting for that company like what benefits they would see and would emphasize those specific benefits of the program for the company. So and out of those 40 engagements we managed to get 16 companies that signed the letter of intent. And by signing letter of intent company basically agrees that they are interested to be part of the program that we can publicly communicate that they are part of the program that they give us their specific interest of the profiles let's say to Java developers with two years of experience with certain frameworks and so on. And that they will participate in the hiring process, but they do not commit to hire if they cannot identify the right candidate. The only like sort of strict measure in the letter of intent was that if the company says yes they want to hire and we start the migration process. So if they change their mind within that process, we will, we would request to cover the expenses that we experienced from the processes that we already started. Yeah, so we had 16 companies that signed that letter of intent. However, only five companies went with us to a budget to the hackathon. So like not not all the companies felt that there was a need. Going together they sort of trusted our HRs and technical people to do that, but it definitely was a lot of value in taking the companies that went with us and one of the very like tangible outcome is that all the companies that went together with us. They actually did hire people in the end. And sometimes they hired people not that, not the profiles they initially wanted, but they just spotted people that they liked. And basically, they were, you know, in the end they were choosing personalities rather than skills or CVs. This is what, what happened during that hackathon. So as you can see, you know, 16 companies signed letter of intent, but only seven in the end hired, which means that during the final interviewing process and skills checkups, some of the companies could not find people that they liked. And there were certain peculiarities around it that I can say briefly later. So you see maybe for the sake of time management and as we are entering into more into the details of the recruitment, maybe you could wrap up quickly. And then I think I'm sure there will be questions for you during the quick Q&A. So sorry, sorry for that. So a few key lessons basically that we learned from engaging the private sector. So one thing is that I mentioned there is perceived needs of 13,000 specialists, but basically the very actual needs of companies can only be by a very active personalized engagement. So this abstract big number that is there in the market and that is known all around for different stakeholders in Lithuania is very different when you come to a specific company. They may want to hire very senior people and then these programs are not necessarily attractive for very senior people. They might want very specific programming languages that is much harder to find in Nigeria and so on. So there had to be a lot of like this personalized approach with the companies. A very important lesson learned is also matching the business needs and the program needs. This is what Daphne also mentioned, you know, managing this ethical, sustainable approach, but also understanding that you're working with the private sector. So let's say in our program we decided to have this one year employment and you know there is a brain drain question and so on. But for the companies this one year is very scary. ICT projects, sophisticated ICT projects usually last longer than one year and for the company to let the person go after the one year is a very painful thing. You know, we want to invest in junior professionals from Nigeria, but for the company as well, you know, hiring a very junior person, they understand that it will require a lot of their training onboarding and maybe only like after half of a year the person will deliver the value added for the company. And since we are not subsidizing salaries in the project, they are getting market salaries and this is how migration regulation works. This was like, I mean, in a way it made onboarding private sector much harder. I think another important thing was that companies that joined the program in the end liked the fact that they are part of the program. I mean, they saw a lot of benefits, not only like filling the gap of the ICT specialists that they need, but also internationalizing involving their current employees in such a program, going together to the hackathon, networking among the companies that are trying to internationalize was also like a lot of value added. And as I said, digital explorers became also like part of the identity. Relocation support again I mentioned so I'm not going deeper into that. And early involvement in the hiring process is also very important. And not whoever from the company but a very specific person within the company is a tech lead when hiring ICT specialists. And we saw a 100% that worked for us. Let's say if we took an HR to the hackathon in Abuja, and the tech lead was not there, it was not as successful as if the tech lead was there. Because tech lead was choosing people for himself or herself in the team. And it's very different if the CEO decides to hire the person and if the tech lead decides to hire a person. It's also known like not only for the hiring but the actual working already in the company would definitely see that in the cases where tech leads chose people for themselves. We see a much better and smoother onboarding process and also working relationship. Yeah, so I guess that's all the key lessons learned for now. And this is a lot of food for so many, many thanks to you to you both. I'm sure we will have many questions from the from the audience. You have really highlighted some of the key challenges that we can already feel, but we have not experienced yet. Cedric, without further ado, please. The floor is yours to dive a little bit more into our challenges when it comes to the recruitment of those young talents. Have to unmute yourself. Okay, definitely. Thank you very much. As well for your for your presentation. So good morning, everyone. I'm Cedric. I'm calling you from sunny London, but I'm having a South African Roy bus boat in Mozambique. So we are already in Africa. I will talk to you today about our experience on the continent. We've been operating over the last 15 years that we've celebrated these vast months or 11 years of business in Nigeria. So I will go for some numbers first to put in perspective. The numbers of Niger, yes, and they got globally speaking Africa and Europe and the countries where we will be operating with with a match project. And then I will explain how we are recruiting what the recruitment process, which could look very similar to the one we have in Europe. And then we go into more details about the challenges we, we haven't thought about during the process and mantis talked about some of them. So we go into into details on it and maybe we talk about the situation. I'm sure some of some of you have heard about the the COVID-19 if you switch on your TV recently. And we discussed a little bit how it could impact the future and the situation over there. So in terms of key figures, you will see the Senegal and Nigeria numbers compared to the European numbers. In terms of population, labor force, but also how many people in terms of ICT are going on to the market on the yearly basis. And this is very important to look at it because just to give you an idea, if we take the Netherlands, Netherlands of the same population of Senegal, if we take Belgium, Luxembourg and Senegal is pretty much the same population as Lagos. Yes, one city. And that show you the volume on the last line of people will be going into the market. We graduated in ICT. And just both Senegal and Nigeria, we've got a minimum of 50,000 people. And this is very conservative because it's difficult to get numbers today around 2% of the people going on the on the markets every year are working to ICT. However, if you look at the average age of the population, there is many more tech and people are interested in technologies while going on the on the market. So, but these numbers are very conservative. So we can think that there is many, many more people going on the market. So there is a big pool of qualified, hungry tech people. In terms of the selection. So how do we work from Nigeria or from Senegal? Very simple, three phases. We've got where to find the candidate, why do we identify him, then we test him, we assess him, and then we select him. Okay, so far, nothing new. So how do we do it? So we've got various tools and we go back on this on this one on the next slides in terms of the database. So we have an international database both in Europe and in Africa. So we look into it to tap into it. We have access to the Senegalese and Niger and diaspora outside their own country, you know, outside Nigeria or outside Senegal. They are they could be in the neighboring countries, but it could be as far as US or China. We've got our local teams that have been working for years for us and have been their own database. We advertise locally in terms of radios, papers, social networks, the WhatsApp, the Instagram, the Facebook and the local websites. And then we do the headhunt. So technically speaking, very, very similar to what we could do in Europe. Testing and Mantas discussed about it, we can receive quite a lot of volume of CVs. You know, even doing a very limited and targeted search, they found 10 for one. So imagine when we start to advertise on LinkedIn Facebook, it could be a thousand or more for one. So we need to do two things and she approached the topic as well, you know, the art skills and the soft skills. That's all we need to make sure sometimes when you receive a fantastic CVs that what's on the team is what's in the team. So we just need to make sure that the CVs you received are accurate compared to the expertise of the people. So we've put in place some methodology and some digital tools where the talents go online, are recorded, timed, and the field as well during the moment they passed the attend the test. And that helps us to monitor but also to rank number of talents. So, you know, in a period of one day, one week, we can assess 5, 10, 20,000 talents. And then based on the art skill selections, we go into the soft skills selection in terms of HR. Once we have identified these people, okay, we go to fall for the selection based on the technical test because personal interviews based on the the expectation of the clients, what they want and what they need, which could be different sometimes and then we submit the CVs. And this period could take two weeks, two, three weeks that we managed to make it happen because we've put in place the team and the digital tools. So it's really a mix between brick and mortar. We are on the ground and the digital tools, we cannot do it with one, either only the team, the people, or only the digital aspect, you know, to have a match in the process between between both. Talking about the database, I want to go into more details before going into the challenges about the tools we are using. So as I said, you know, this international database that we have to detail a little bit more because what's on the database, you know, sometimes it's a big pool of talents, but it needs to be organized. So depending on the countries, we need to organize it based on the language skills, you know, certainly in Europe that we don't speak the same language, it's in Africa as well. So main languages are English, French and Portuguese, so we have to adapt our database and the people working on it as well. In terms of advertising, so obviously we've got the Aldelia website which is quite known now and we receive quite a lot of application on the daily basis, LinkedIn as well, it's a good tool, but it doesn't work that well in Africa. And then there is some special database in the oil and gas, in the IT, depending on what we're looking for, medias and the printed medias which working quite well still in Africa, you know, today in Europe we don't advertise on paper media, but in Africa you do so. Market mapping, this is even more a service, but we use it once we've done the mapping to collect and to keep the candidates. That means at the example this week where a big company has won a contract in Senegal to build a motorway and they don't have any office, they have never been there, they don't speak French for Senegal and they have to recruit 4,000 people and obviously the motorway is between two cities, so they want to recruit people in the capital and then up to the cities they will build the motorway in order to have a social impact. And that's where all digital platform can help because we will be able to find people on each cities in each location, each community. And that's quite a big work because we are able to say based on the manpower plan, so the manpower plan is the list of people they will need during the length of the project, they will be able to say, look, we will find based on the job description and the job title, you will find the people here and then. If we don't find the people in the country, we will find the people in neighboring countries or abroad and that's where we can bring expats but we can document it. Networking as well is very important and we worked a lot. In Africa the word of mouth and the networking works well as well. And recently we launched the Arriva job, it was more a tool to develop the solidarity and to develop a new model to work in Africa and to recruit where the companies will be able to, it's a marketplace where everyone will be able to advertise and to give hope to people because after the COVID-19 crisis to go back to prosperity we need jobs. So at least we are also advertising all our jobs on Arriva jobs and all clients advertise for themselves as well. And this is a platform which will be growing very, very fast and because we've got lots of interest at the moment. If you have more questions on it I will be able to go into more details because I'm conscious about the time. Now the challenges, here is the interesting part. So you see same phases, candidate identification, the interview, the test and the selection. So, fine, once we have done that, you arrive in Nigeria or Senegal. And as Mantid said, okay, where do we find the people, which location, where we are, which media, do we do the same as Europe? No, how do we manage volume? Because this is important, you can easily receive two, three, five thousand applications for one position. So, I can tell you, that will smash your inbox. I don't know how many emails you're receiving on a daily basis, but I have hundreds, 120, that's more than enough. So when you've got 2,000, forget it. So you need to get organized. Time scale as well. Sometimes the time is not the same, is not appreciated the same way. So you need to be organized to put in place processes and to impose your time scale. Budget as well. Budget needs to be very clear from the beginning. That could be costly, going on the ground, advertising, wasting time in receiving the wrong people. So this is what you don't see when you say, okay, I will be recruiting. Recruitment is easy. You post an ad, you get some CVs and you choose one. No, it's a little bit more complicated, more volume. So once you, let's say you have identified your candidate, okay, all the CVs you are receiving are matching really, really the person. Can the person is able to do what she said? You know, some people are very good salespeople. They are very less IT developer. So you need to double check that. Logistics as well. Logistics is a keyword. Nigeria. Or even in Senegal, the transportation going to the meetings could take, if you want to cross the city, could take two hours, three hours more depending on whether the candidates are coming from. I'm talking about Lagos because Abuja will be different. And I'm not even talking to cities in the north where I wouldn't recommend you to go. Even for me now, even in the south, there's some logistics who needs to be organized. So whether it's face to face digital, do we have the same, the right person in front of you. And then what is very important, and the point has been approached earlier by Manté, you know, you need to do both interview, the technical and the HR interview, you know, to make sure that you've got the right person. You know, the person will be recruiting with this person. We'll match and that's very important. Then you've got the selection once you have done your interview face. You've got another logistics, you know, once you do your shortlist, you've got the contract, you've got the onboarding, and especially depending on where these people will be working. You need to do all the immigration, you need to be the contract, you need to be the salary, the payroll, the taxes, the medical insurance, the pension. Once again, this is something we don't think about at the beginning. This is not complicated. This is complex. Yes, but it's not complicated. So it needs to be managed. And the last point is a cross-cultural training, but not only for the one coming from Africa, from the one receiving. From Europe, you know, even between ourselves, you know, in Europe, something would be good to have some cross-cultural training between ourselves to understand ourselves better. So you will face the same challenges receiving a Nigerian person and you can get a cultural training for Nigeria, but you will need another one from Senegal. And each country would be different. This is not a challenge. This is a chance because you will learn much more from these people you will be recruiting. And I take the advantage to have the mic and to ask for Monty the first question of the Q&A. Sorry Daphne if I'm disrupting, but my question would be, will this Nigerian brought only tech technology or ICT? Or what about their culture? What's the company where received them, received technically from them, but also in terms of culture? And I think that's an interesting point for us to know because I'm pretty sure that on top of the technical aspect, there is some ideas, drive, innovation, which would be different if you would have recruited someone from Lithuania or from Europe. So sorry, that was my first question for Q&A. And then last point, and I'm looking at the time, I'm still fine. COVID-19, you know, today, a month ago, we were recruiting someone to go to an office and they have to go on the traffic and they have to sit at nine, up to five or six depending on. But now where is home? Where is the office? Why do we need to be there? You know, we are talking from each other home place. So that generates lots of aspects, lots of changes and maybe a cultural revolution, you know, at least in terms of HR, in terms of way of working. But even clients like in Africa, whether they're in the chemical industry or in the fuel distribution, what they mean today, 80% of our staff is working from home and it's working very, very well. Very, very well. And it's not only tech, it could be assistance, it could be HR, it could be payroll, it could be cost controller, finance, whatever. And that will make their life much, much better. So people, companies, industrial companies in Africa are thinking about a new way of working. So you need to think about all the HR aspects if you decide to recruit someone from home office of a remote work, because today, and more and more we'll be able to recruit and to work remotely. Whether we want to or because we have to based on the pandemic on the situation or anything. Today is difficult to plan as we could see. The HR aspects are important. The legal aspects are very important. The contract, the taxes benefits everything. This is key and this need to be thought in advance. Sometimes and not only from Africa, I can tell you from London, sometimes the infrastructure, the internet connections is not that simple, but at least this needs to be organized. And then all the reporting aspects as well, you know, you need to make sure that someone working remotely works, what is he doing, what you're expecting, what is expecting from you. And these kind of things needs to be managed and thought and discussed. So that's an interesting slide as well for future and we cannot not think about it. You know, it's, it's something we at least we need to approach it. Thank you for this last point. I think that indeed COVID-19 is in everybody's mind. Again, for the sake of time management, as we only have 25 minutes left, I'd like now to open the discussion with our with our participants. And let me thank you really colleagues from Africa for your truly excellent presentations. Actually, I see that no one has posted a question yet, which means that your presentation were truly good and no one, you know, you have answered all our questions, which is amazing. Now, more, more seriously, let me actually get back to one of the points that you stress about integration, because I would like to actually abuse my position as a moderator to ask the first question and to kick off our debate today. Mente and Evgenia. Of course, as you have highlighted in your presentation, there is quite a stretch for these young talents to come all the way from Nigeria to Lithuania. I believe that the culture are quite radically different. And in one of the slides, you have pointed out the fact that you are mentoring your explorer and that you have really developed some sort of solid integration programs. Could you expand slightly on that, because actually interestingly enough, companies that have approached us have raised this problem. And they were very curious to see how in the match program, we would actually ensure the soft landing, if you will, of our young talents. Yeah, so I think one of the very first things we did, I'm not sure it would be also like so relevant for your context, but for the selected explorers, we straight away told them that they're going to be cultural challenges. I think we didn't try to sugarcoat what Lithuania is. I think it was also good that they met before they left Nigeria, you know, the tech leads and so on and saw that Lithuania is a much more reserved, you know, not as talkative. I mean, they already had a bit of an idea what we'll be waiting for them in Lithuania. But then when it comes to support what we did, of course we worked quite a bit with companies. We asked them to assign internally like to have a buddy and a mentor and it's better that the body is not like your direct superior right that's someone that you can have a more informal relationship. Then we also gathered a number of Lithuanian people as local buddies, like people that are just random people. Most of them were actually Lithuanians who lived abroad before themselves. So they sort of were aware what kind of challenges people have when they moved to a new country. And we have a very lively actually engagements with those local buddies like we have a WhatsApp group and there is a lot of action. Like at some in the beginning we had to support a lot of explorers by ourselves, but then we saw it like step by step this support drifted towards the local buddies as well. And I think I mean the key thing is just to be very aware of the context. You know, let's say Lithuania is another challenge is we don't have a huge diaspora communities, which meant that explorers will be basically one of the very few Nigerians in Lithuania. Yes, there are students they managed to find some students, but we knew that they will they will need more support from us because they will be not so many people that they are more related with. But still, even though no matter how much we thought about it. When they arrived realized that the shock is even bigger, you know we went for shopping they didn't know what it means to have warm clothes like because they never felt what it means when it's called. So we went in order to buy like winter jackets and people were asking is this is this warm enough like because the, yeah, it's just so different. I think for the for the companies. What is important also to understand is that there's no magic training or magic bullet that you can, you know, listen to two days speaker or in on intercultural communication and it would solve all your problems. I think what is very important to understand for companies who are hiring these style talents and especially if they haven't been previously exposed to to people from Africa or even just any other countries, which is a case of some of our companies. These are the first international talents that they have. So it's important to understand that it won't be a one day challenge that it will be a continuous process and that you would have to come back and review what you are doing. And we are sort of serving as a cultural mediator in some cases but it's a very individual and tailored assistance then it's that what I'm trying to say is not enough just to have a training, but it you have to think of a system in place how you provide this individual support, both for the companies and for the talents. No absolutely here with the match project. We will develop also a buddy system and we are lucky that in the destination country in Europe you have quite a large diaspora community. But Cedric, as you raise this integration question, would you have some tips for us as I believe that you've seen a lot of challenges there as well. Yes, we could we could do a full webinar but I might make you laugh but the main thing that the Nigerian are missing, you know when they're traveling to Europe is a spice, you know, they have very spicy food, and they find very tasteless in Europe. That's funny they can add a very very well but the spice, you know, you can put as many as a chili curry on so on. It's not enough. But except that. Yes, there is some cultural challenges. Yes, you will learn from them that we learn from you. You learn every day seriously we've been in Africa 15 years we know a lot about Africa we know this this and we are learning every day. So that's definitely a day to day learn and challenging and refreshing time because you are creating. So what you need you need to get out of your a priori and this is very difficult your own thinking and you need to be very open minded and not to be worried about asking questions. Why there is no stupid question why do you say that why you understand that because after it goes into details. You know, you think you understand but some small details a small world, and that the depth of words, you know, when you learn the language, you learn it flat, you know that these words mean this. But what doesn't mean technically the culture of the experience the story of the world. This is this is very important. So, yes, this is a challenge, but this is not impossible. So but despite seriously it's important for me to bring this despite with them. Thanks for the for the tip that's that's indeed a an important one. I really invite all our participants please to to post your, your, your questions. As we really want to address what is of interest to you. And one question to our colleagues from the digital explorers project. So, in terms of selection process. I think that we would like to understand a bit more how the recruitment has been spread out. So, are you aiming at having after one year, a new batch of of explorers coming to Lithuania. One very important question as well is I understand that the initial target number was 50. If I'm not mistaken, we currently have 15. So if you could just give us a few details. And then we will look at other questions raised by the participants about the return, but first maybe the the recruitment. So, I'm thinking that one of the differences that there is between digital explorers and the match project as far as I understand is that the match project you will be recruiting one by one or as there is a need from the companies. Whereas what we did, we did a batch recruitment. It was very important for us. And it's something that Manta mentioned that we've been we started creating an identity of digital explorers. We started to creating a program that has that people can identify with. And it was also when we think about logistics of bringing people to Lithuania. And it's much easier to manage them when they are in a bigger group. So therefore we our recruitment process was done in the beginning of 2019. And we just decided that this is these are the two or three months that we are doing recruitment. And then we're going to stop bring the people to Lithuania and they will start working in the companies. And then we finished the recruitment process. There were no more recruitments, even though we started to have companies coming, approaching us for being interested to recruit from Nigeria. So I think that's that's the difference between our two projects. So all the recruitment was done in the beginning of 2019. It was very intense process. We had to do it do recruitment of companies and of the explorers at the same time. So that was indeed a super intense time for us. And it was done so because our project was limited in time altogether. So we had to make sure that people come and have one year in Lithuania and then there's time left for reintegration. At that time there was no possibility, for example, to extend our project, which we have right now. And that brings me to question of the target numbers. What we have thought initially and something that Manta mentioned there was this study done that in Lithuania we are missing 13,000 ICT specialists. And from our initial conversations with ICT companies, we also had a feeling that, yes, indeed, there is an interest and we had 40 companies that were initially interested and wanted more engagement. But it becomes very different when you come to the point where the person has to sign a contract with a person. So that's whole process from yes, I'm interested into let me put my signature here is very challenging and there are different things also happening in between. For example, we had a company that had a change in management and therefore they decided not to participate anymore. Also the migration process and the time that you have to wait for the person to come to work with you is also a challenge with the companies because when they want a person, they want him to start next week, not in three months. But migration process does take time and that's why when we are looking at the companies that ended up hiring people and you look at their motivation, it's not necessarily because they were missing technical people, but because they were part of the program and it became cool for them to be a digital explorer as a company as well. And right now, this is probably of course something that we bear in mind in terms of branding and communication. I see some more questions coming in. So just let me follow the thread of questions. So here in Belgium and in the Netherlands, as I as I explained in my short introduction, we've started really this active outreach to to the companies. One big questions that we have and that you have alluded to in your presentation is the fact that we of course have designed programs where we foresee temporary the placement in Europe and then a return. And as you explain, the companies have to invest a great deal in those young talents in those explorers. It takes quite some time for the worker, if I understand well to warm up to be then productive. And then comes of course the end of the already the end of the program and the person has to return. And from the discussion that you had back in Lithuania with employers, can you estimate more or less the number of candidates who will be sponsored to stay in Lithuania, rather than to return to Nigeria? Well, so it's loud like now it's a decision moment. So we don't know for sure yet how many of them will be retained or at least companies will try to retain them. We know that two companies already decided or like one specifically decided and started the process and that company has three people now on the while they have four people on the team but they they have decided for now for the free to retain and others are thinking. I think another thing what I want to raise is actually it's not only the the interest of the companies to retain the people longer, but actually explorers themselves, you know, like they come. They just start feeling that they are there, that they are learning that they are finally feel comfortable. And it also frustrating for them to think that now they have to go back. Like now is the moment where they need to think again, you know that they need to go back they need to look for another employer and so on because they just started feeling comfortable actually at this company. And we have a lot of discussions with our partners in Nigeria like how do we look at it. Are we upset if most of them stays. But I mean our key sort of takeaway is that one year is really a short period of time. You know, most or like a number of Nigerian startups or better companies like the mobile established companies are established by people who came back from abroad but not after one year they came back after five years. And this is what we also hear from from our explorers that they say, you know, like they also say that okay if this program ends for me and I might need to go back to Nigeria now I will still look still look for opportunities to go abroad again because now I feel like I can and I want to get more more experience. So it is a very tricky moment at the same time I can say that there are explorers that are really ready and interested to going back and these are usually more senior people. So there are you know like quite senior experienced engineers who came with an idea that they just want to get this international experience to see the new market. And they feel quite comfortable going back because actually they are very well paid in Nigeria as well because this is a very interesting point for for our consideration. So that colleagues are asking a question with regards to the recruitment process and Cedric back to you maybe to ask you a question. Let me be a bit blunt here. In our previous experience, we know we have been confronted with the fact that it is difficult not to face interference with the recruitment process. This problem of a fair recruitment ethical recruitment of the talents can be really challenging. So how can we ensure actually that that the recruitment is fair. And another question and maybe this is also for our colleagues from Africa. What about the gender balance because in the match project we are very conscious of the fact that women may not have the same chance and we really want to promote 30% of female applicants. So is this a realistic target? Cedric maybe first reaction. To regret the first question fair is key obviously recruitment there is lots of subjectivity especially when you go into the soft skills you know the matching with the person you know. However in terms of technical aspect there is no is very pragmatic you know we've got tests. And even sometimes if we are approached by someone who wants to put his nephew his son his neighbor whoever someone from the village, whatever now it goes through the test. There is no negotiation possible and they know and we are tough you know like like in Nigeria it's very direct and we have to because for us that's our reputation you know and this is very important to have the right people. But even for the talents, you know, if we are not fair and if we don't provide, propose the right candidate the right talent the talent won't be able to do the job it will not fit in the company. It will be a failure for all of us. So this is not important. This is very important. And that's not a problem to be to be very very strict. However, recruitment is not an exact science, you know, sometimes you make mistakes in recruitment. So after a period of time realize oops, my mistake, whether the talents whether it's the candidate it's the client. So it happens it happens and we need to to accept it in terms of equal gender for us it is very important. But for us it's natural 50% of the allelia staff are women. But that means when they recruit they recruit women as well. Men who recruit women for us we are fair and we're not recruiting women because they're women we're recruiting women because they're good, you know, and we've got experience in Ghana, where we had to put in place some training programs. It was not in it in ICT it was in mechanics, electric, HSC, oil and gas, so very very technical coming out of technical engineering universities and so on. We've done the first program of 15 people, you know, and the first 15 were all men, but it was the first organization we didn't know and we, it went very difficult and we didn't have lots of time to do the communication toward the talents. We've done the second year, we've done the same program with 33 candidates talents been selected. But before we've done lots of communication towards women saying, hey, you can join this program you can come you can carbon your studies and so on and so on you don't need to go home. And 40% were women, the top five were women. So today in Africa, there is more and more women who are graduating were following courses. So I think this is important to have objective 30% is a good one and we could even try to reach more in the future and at least if we recruit we will try to do so. But and based on the volume as well of candidates, I think this is really really achievable and women are excellent, excellent candidates, excellent talents. So we really really recommend and this is very important to have a balance in the team when you recruit a number of people. So, no, for me, I'm very confident that you will, you will be able to recruit and to reach this 30% objective. Definitely. Thank you for these words of wisdom as we're reaching the end of this webinar colleagues from Africa or anything to add on those two points. About about women. We had an ambition to to have more women in the in the selected digital explorers. Right now we have four women out of 15 that have arrived to misdemeanor so that's that's almost 30% I think. But right now, and that brings me to the question of the target that we had previously. Right now we are we are working on the extension within the project and we want to target 15. Females who would do internship type of program in Lithuania and this would be specifically in data analytics moving towards data science. So, and this is our way of kind of compensating that we haven't managed to reach a higher number of women in the first track. But also, this is also our way of managing what Manta was mentioning this brain drain brain gain tensions. Because as we're starting to see a lot of explorers current explorers and companies who want to continue this their employment relationship. And we think that an internship program with an internship spin off within our current program can mediate this tensions because those females would come for an intensive training they would have placement in companies. And then they would return back to to Nigeria and will be assisted in their integration so to find jobs that that would match the skills that they have been polishing or acquiring while in Lithuania. But that's still in the making so it's there are no results we cannot. So we can show you another webinar was in a few months to discuss that precisely this is this is great. We are reading the end of this meeting but this was really really a very valuable feedback and thank you very very much for taking the time to share your wealth of expertise. We bear in mind after this discussion the importance of really tailor made actually assistance to the companies. It's not good enough just to brand the project we really have to dive into the specifics of the of the of the market and guide the companies. We we we bear in mind setting the importance of the sourcing and the testing of the of the candidates both to preserve the integrity of our programs the ethical standards but also the high quality of the of the recruitment. Thanks to your inputs we also now understand better the importance of the fact that the onboarding is not limited to. Let's say the visa and the and the really practical things but we really have to look at the yes the human side of things and Cedric of course we will think of buying spices for our young talents this is a very important tip but thank you very very much for for that. So, we will, of course, keep in touch with you and have we had questions that we could not actually answer in in details, but that we will share with you for for feedback. With regards to, for instance, a more detailed administrative aspects of things. And I see already that you have made yourself available to for bilateral conversation with our experts and thank you very much for for that. We will be in touch as I said, I think we really hope to be able also to bring some some highlights from our own experience. Have a lovely day everyone and talk to you soon. Goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye. Goodbye.