In our latest Strategic Pro Bono engagement, Team4Tech connected 15 Benevity employee volunteers with our Uganda-based nonprofit partner, Women In Technology Uganda (WITU), to improve the digital tools and platforms WITU uses to serve its learners.
[WITU’s] commitment and passion for furthering employment opportunities for young women is inspiring. I hope the work we completed allows for a more seamless user experience that deepens engagement and success rates for students.”
—Benevity Volunteer
Building Digital Skills for Job Readiness
Young women in Uganda are being left out of economic opportunity. 74% of Ugandans aged 15-25 are unemployed, the majority of whom are young women. Girls from under-resourced communities also face limited access to high-quality education and jobs.
WITU’s mission is to contribute to the economic growth and gender equality in Africa through skills development and innovation, encouraging entrepreneurship, and unlocking opportunities for women and girls. Since 2014, WITU has supported the skills development of over 10,000 young women from under-resourced communities in 56 districts across Uganda. They report that 74% of their alumnae are gainfully employed, and 100% are digitally literate.
Team4Tech has partnered with WITU since 2019. This is our seventh skills-based volunteering engagement together. Together, WITU and Team4Tech are expanding equitable access to technology to help break the cycles of poverty and inequality.
Volunteers Create Digital Solutions to Support Women Entrepreneurs
Over eight weeks, Benevity volunteers collaborated with the WITU team virtually to better understand WITU’s context and the young women it serves. The volunteers chosen to work on this AI-focused skills-based volunteering project brought a diversity of backgrounds and together looked to address two scopes of work:
- Optimize WITU’s career readiness platform for an improved user experience to better support young women in their journey from education to employment.
- Build an AI-powered agent to help women entrepreneurs keep accurate business records through voice-enabled bookkeeping.
Volunteers split into two subteams to address these challenges, meeting virtually with their teams and with WITU staff to iterate, ask questions, and get feedback throughout the process.
WITU’s existing digital platform, Elevate Her 360, provides workforce readiness training, mentorship, and employment support for its learners.
To suggest improvements to the platform’s user experience and drive increased learner adoption, the volunteer subteam carefully explored the platform as users and captured their findings. As skills-based volunteering adapts in an AI landscape, the volunteers leveraged AI tools to quickly generate prototypes for WITU’s feedback and iteration.
Through this process, volunteer deliverables included:
- User Journey Map: Volunteers created a cross-platform map spanning e-learning, mentorship, and job search. This highlighted for the WITU team the main drop-off points for women and how to keep them moving through the workflow and staying engaged on the platform.
- Unified MFA Login: To help learners sign in once and move freely between platform features, volunteers launched secure, unified login credentials with multi-factor authentication across all WITU sites. Elevate Her 360 now offers single sign-on across all their learning, jobs, mentorship, and e-library platform areas, with a redesigned, accessible login page.
- Reduced Onboarding Friction: Volunteers streamlined early setup by simplifying user consent updates, course selection, and professional CV creation.
- Enhanced Mentorship Usability: Volunteers created automated reminders within the platform to follow up on mentorship requests and after first sessions with learners.
- Upgraded Security Features: To protect learners on the platform, volunteers enabled patched legacy security vulnerabilities and protected against password guessing.
Looking back on this project, the biggest takeaway was the power of context. Spending real, hands-on time in the platform as a user was essential. It was genuinely fascinating to watch how even a small UI change could dramatically impact a user’s journey. And beyond just using the platform ourselves, we had to anchor every decision on the actual users—their range of education levels, device access, and language needs—rather than defaulting to a comfortable North American frame of reference. Knowing our design choices could make a tangible impact for young women navigating real barriers to jobs and further education kept us driven every step of the way. ”
— Benevity Volunteer
Overcoming Barriers for Ugandan Entrepreneurs Through AI Voice-Enabled Financial Records
Women entrepreneurs in Uganda often can’t get loans. This is not a reflection of unsuccessful businesses, but rather because they lack financial records or credit history. Many bookkeeping apps assume users can read, type, and fill out forms—limiting factors for many of WITU’s women entrepreneurs.
Solving for this challenge, our other subteam of volunteers worked to design a tool that enables women entrepreneurs to keep business records just by talking in their own language.
Through a multi-stage discovery process and structured testing, the volunteer subteam was able to develop a voice-first interface. That means that WITU entrepreneurs could speak an entry, hear it read back to them, and confirm that the inputs are accurate. The conversational bookkeeping agent turns speech into structured income and expense records. The volunteer team also helped to set up dashboards for both women and loan officers, helping to keep track of books, reports, and per-client ledgers.
Volunteers incorporated their solutions directly into WITU’s Nsimbi Impact app, leveraging the login that women already use. This made it easy for WITU’s community to use these solutions right away. The volunteer team also provided a blueprint for what long-term WhatsApp integration might look like for future consideration and implementation.
We worked directly with WITU to understand exactly what they wanted, and built this to fit these women’s needs. The result is that these women unlock loans and grow their businesses, because they can track and share their finances clearly. And since we documented everything, WITU doesn’t have to rely on us going forward—if they need to edit, update, or keep iterating, they can do it themselves.”
— Benevity Volunteer
Partnerships That Accelerate Impact and Drive Innovation
The commitment and passion for furthering employment opportunities for young women is inspiring. I hope the work we completed allows for a more seamless user experience that deepens engagement and success rates for students.”
— Benevity Volunteer
Team4Tech and Benevity are dedicated to leveraging innovative technology to help nonprofits make a bigger impact. The recent Benevity State of Corporate Volunteering report highlighted Goodera data that revealed 71% of nonprofits see using AI as an urgent priority, while Benevity data revealed that only 3% currently have the tools and training to do so. Team4Tech is working to close this gap through various AI capacity-building initiatives. We’re grateful to partner with an organization whose volunteers brought that spirit of innovation to the work, dedicating their time and expertise to support our nonprofit partner. We’re also grateful to the WITU team for their collaboration, insight, and commitment throughout the project. We look forward to seeing how these solutions continue to evolve and support WITU and their learners.
Skills-based volunteering engagements like this project are just one example of how Team4Tech is accelerating the impact for education-focused nonprofits around the world. Explore more stories from Team4Tech’s work building capacity for our partners.