Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform

If you are a young person living in the Global South, you are part of a generation facing enormous challenges, including high unemployment, rapid urbanisation, and the worsening environmental crisis. The Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform (YIEP) turns these challenges into opportunities. Using digital technologies, young people are empowered to lead transformational change in their communities while also earning an income.

Transforming Challenges into Opportunities

The pioneering group of implementing partners who participated in the first phase of designing and bringing the Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform to life included DUCT, Greater Stellenbosch Trust (GST), the Hoedspruit Hub and Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.

The YIEP is designed to connect young people to meaningful opportunities that align with their aspirations while addressing community challenges. For instance:

• A DUCT Enviro Champ in KwaZulu-Natal uses the platform to participate in bio-monitoring the Msunduzi River. This work not only generates income but also directly addresses pollution, improving the local environment.
• In Gauteng, an unemployed young person passionate about electronics can access training in solar installations, gaining practical experience and helping expand access to renewable energy in their community.
• In Hoedspruit, a recent matriculant takes on the role of an education facilitator, using a game-based approach to support numeracy development in others while improving their own skills and earning an income.

An Overview of the Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform Design Sprint

To ensure the platform meets the needs of youth-focused social enterprises in South Africa (SA), UNICEF initiated a collaborative Design Sprint from July 29 to November 4, 2024. Over six two-week cycles, key stakeholders from the Yoma ecosystem joined forces with IXO to co-create the platform. The focus was on designing systems for coordination, financing, verification, governance, and learning around youth-led impacts.

"The Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform is an innovative solution that allows impact funding to go straight to youth, who generate results relevant for themselves and the children in their communities. It powers a triple benefit: to the youth themselves, to their younger peers, and to the funders, given the cost savings generated through the use of Web3 technologies." — Johannes Wedenig, UNICEF

“We believe that everyone has talent, but not everyone gets the same chances. This is especially true for young people who struggle to navigate complicated learning and earning pathways. The underlying technology of Yoma is designed to make the learning and earning journey of a young person more seamless by reducing the number of sign-ups, logins, and other unnecessary stumbling blocks experienced with digital and online platforms. More importantly, the technology can play a facilitating role or simply integrate into an existing digital ecosystem. With integration, the learning and impact can be measured, verified, validated, and even monetised in some instances, using blockchain technology. This allows potential employers to send signals to young people by verifying the credentials earned, thereby creating trust, value, and demand through an existing pipeline of potential future employees. To offset the limits of what the labor market can absorb, the impact marketplace will allow young people to access and choose from the growing impact economy. We are very excited by the potential of what this technology will bring to the labor and impact marketplace.” – Ben-Albert Smith, UNICEF

At the heart of the Yoma Impacts Ecosystem Platform are 'Impact Opportunities'—micro income generating activities that allow young people to:

1. Directly contribute to verified environmental impact.
2. Build real world skills and experiences, verified and credentialled.
3. Receive cash and redeemable rewards for their contributions.

Impact Opportunities provide young people with hands-on experience in the rapidly growing impact economy, enabling them to make a tangible difference in their communities.

By incorporating feedback from stakeholders, the sprint successfully configured the open-source Impacts Portal software application to meet the specific requirements for the YIEP.

Partner Contributions and Perspectives

Collaboration has been the driving force behind the YIEP. As Shawn Alimohammadi, Ecosystems Developer at IXO, explains:

"This was a fast-paced and collaborative journey. We worked with some of the most inspiring and impactful organisations in South Africa, focusing on compassionate listening and understanding what local impact organisations need to succeed."

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator:

"While funding for youth-led impact opportunities exists, the ability to verify evidence/activities and easily facilitate payments to young people remains a challenge. The YIEP addresses this by enabling verification and payments in an auditable manner, unlocking additional funding and supporting operational efficiencies. Enabling verification and payments in a manner that supports the needs of funders, implementation partners, and most importantly youth, will not only unlock additional funding, it will also support additional data collection, insights generation all whilst supporting operational efficiencies, which mean more of the available funding can be channeled to the youth themselves." — Guy Shand

DUCT:

"Overall, I found this process to be incredibly helpful in getting us started with the IXO platform, especially considering that we are not specialists in the digital systems industry. I believe the pilot will perform very well once all the systems are in place.” - Lethu Mahlaba 

Greater Stellenbosch Trust:

"Participating in this design process and working with the IXO team has shown us what real verified decentralised impact could look like. For us, it was very rewarding and inspiring, as our team had been looking at these types of ideas for a while already but struggled to find practical examples of implementation. The sprint process made this vision a reality." — Carolina Carvalho, GST

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Building the first iteration of the platform came with its share of challenges. The team balanced the complexity of designing solutions for multi-stakeholder challenges with the need to create a user-friendly platform for individuals with varying levels of digital literacy.

"The main challenge was related to the technical side of things: turning an in-person play-based numeracy development program into a measurable digital workflow. However, this challenge was fun, and we are excited to see how it benefits the communities we serve." — Carolina Carvalho, GST

"The sprint process challenged us to think about diverse use cases for the platform while considering the ecosystem’s needs. The IXO team’s flexibility and accountability helped create a product that solves real-world problems." — Guy Shand, Harambee

"The IXO protocol and its domains are highly versatile. However, adapting them to specific use cases posed a challenge in creating templates that are both intuitive and user-friendly. It was also tricky to explain the IXO terminology and process flow to the design partners, which required us to simplify concepts and align on a shared understanding.” - Alwyn van Wyk and Graeme Leighton, IXO

Next Steps and Future Vision

The first design phase is only the beginning. In 2025, the focus will shift to strengthening integrations with aligned collaborators, advancing technical capabilities like Impact Evaluation Oracles, and enhancing usability to ensure the platform meets the diverse needs of its users.

"We want young African developers and activists at the heart of this initiative. Young people must be involved in shaping decisions across social, economic, technological, and environmental domains. Decentralised tools can finally give young people a meaningful seat at the table, allowing them to co-create their futures. " — Shawn Alimohammadi

Join the Movement

Be part of this change by supporting and sharing this vision. For more information or to get involved as an impact partner, capital allocator, technical collaborator, or young person, please connect here.