The demand for African creatives is on the rise. More so, the gig economy is on an upward projection since the pandemic that makes the industry experienced tremendous growth. By 2023, the growth rate is expected to reach $455 billion, which doubles the value in 2018. With the increasing demand for creatives and the growth rate of the gig industry, we’ve seen more freelance platforms resurrect.
Meaningful Gigs is one of such platform. The startup has raised $6M seed funding led by Stage 2 Capital with participation from Rethink Education, Authentic Ventures, Reach Capital, Marla Blow, Zvi Band, and Michele Perry.
With this precede, the startup plans to accelerate its growth — onboard more creatives on its platform and launch an aggressive marketing campaign to get about 100 corporates on board over the next year, from the present 40 enterprises currently using its platform.
The co-founder and CEO of Meaningful Gigs, Ronnie Kwesi Coleman, told our source that —
“We are thinking about how we can let more dimensional traders all over the continent know that we exist to help them make five to seven times more what they are making locally. We are creating more referral programs to help scale throughout the continent through our platform.”
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“The other side of it is just letting more brands like the top-tier ones know that we exist because there’s a need for creatives in every company and every company right now is struggling to hire talent, and they just don’t even know that there’s a world full of talent waiting,” Coleman revealed.
What You Should Know About Meaningful Gigs
Meaningful Gigs poises itself as a tech-enabled one-stop marketplace for African freelance creatives looking to earn a living by taking remote jobs from multinationals companies in the U.S. The Washington D.C.-based startup helps African digital creatives upskill and connect them with enterprise companies looking for highly-skilled, diverse designers. It has worked with multinationals in the U.S. like Coca-Cola, Audi, Vans, and IDEO.
The startup was founded in 2018 by Ronnie Kwesi Coleman with Stephanie Nachemja-Bunton (COO) and Max Farago (CTO), from the need to create a platform that would offer more gigs that pay well for creatives looking for nontraditional work opportunities and new labour market entrants in Africa. This can be termed as helping companies source talent outside the usual pools.
Coleman narrated, “The three of us have been friends for the last 10 years, and we are part of the same creative community. One day, we came across this startling statistic that said by 2050, the number of young people entering the workforce in Africa would be more than all the young people entering the workforce in the rest of the world. And we thought this was crazy. It hit us that we could build a business around this. And personally, it resonated with me because I grew up in Ghana.”
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Before founding Meaningful Gigs, Coleman, who has been in the creative and tech industry for a decade, established another entity with Nachemja-Bunton that helped designers earn a “sustainable living”. More so, he was the former Director of Business Development at StayNTouch, a hotel management platform.
On the other hand, Nachemja-Buntonhas had a long career in education, where he previously held several positions, including One World Education as the Director of Teaching and Learning. While Farago, the third co-founder, is an experienced data engineer and the former VP of engineering at Deep Root Analytics. He had a background in law before transitioning into tech a few years back.
Building the Number One Remote Jobs Marketplace for Creatives
Designers go through a vetting process that includes test projects to sign up on the platform. Meaningful Gigs has matched “thousands” of its creatives from “over a dozen” countries in Africa with clients.
While matching the right gig workers with the right company is the startup’s main business, Meaningful Gigs also plans to offer continuous training to designers signed up on its platform to ensure that they are up to speed with the latest knowledge, trends and technologies in the fast-evolving digital world.
“What we have seen is that for anybody to succeed in this ever-evolving digital landscape, going into a job is not enough — you need to be able to learn skills on the job. And so, we want to build the number one remote jobs and skills marketplace for creatives, where we will be teaching people new skills as they go. We are blending jobs with education,” said Nachemja-Bunton.
Commenting on the investment, Stage 2 Capital partner Mandy Cole mention that — “We’ve been impressed with the Meaningful Gigs team’s focus in providing the best design experience for their clients while providing amazing tools for their creatives; we’re excited to support their journey to become the destination for diverse design talent.”
“With the shortage of highly skilled talent and the increasing need for diverse thinking, especially in creative, marketing and product, Meaningful Gigs is solving a huge problem by connecting talented African creatives with companies to deliver best-in-class design,” Mandy said.
In conclusion, Coleman revealed that they want Meaning Gigs to become the number one remote jobs marketplace globally. “We want to create 100,000 jobs by 2028. We are focusing on customer empathy and understanding what they need. A lot of investment will be spent creating the best experience for them. We want to make working with African creatives 10 times better than working with anybody else.”