Xogsiiye Business Information Line
Challenge
Establishing a business in Somalia/land can be extremely difficult and long especially if you don’t have the necessary information to readily available to establish a business.
Project Goals
The Somaliland government through support from World Bank has been trying to establish a One-Stop-Shop for business registration to make the process of registration seamless. This is only limited to physical registration by bringing together all government agencies involved in the process under one roof. However, access to information on business registration is not widely available especially to the population we serve. During the LEAD project, Shaqodoon provided awards to some youth entrepreneurs to establish or expand their businesses and generally feedback while registering for their business have stated the complexity and lack of readily available information on business registration. Many of the business have opted not to register as a result which means the government is losing out access to the right information.
Key Activities
MoU with Ministry or Chamber of Commerce
Desk research and information collection, content adjustment for IVR
Systems designs, call flows, development, secure short code, testing and roll out.
Establish Ministry needs to linking calls to existing staff and capacity building needs.
Develop awareness information on Radio, TV and Social Media. (4wk)
Public launch of service
Impact
To respond to these challenges Shaqodoon will implement automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Business Information Hotline for business and youth to access up to date and accurate information while registering their businesses. Over 70% of the Somali population are estimated to be illiterate and the interest penetration is low at only 1.2% according to stats released by Google in 2011, though we believe it is currently about 10%. The IVR will partially be popular with an entrepreneur in informal sectors who want to transition formalizing their business. This system will provide Shaqodoon and Spark the opportunity to establish a database of businesses, which rare to find in the Somali regions. The systems will be integrated into single backend allowing for capturing of useful data from the business.
The information service can contribute to an entrepreneur or business in the informal sector establishing taking first steps to formalize their businesses as a result of the information they received. We expect to see more business registering and them understanding the benefits. We can track business registered by collecting simple information when they call in. This information will serve as a pre-test and baseline for the project.
To give broad perspective to potential popularity of the service with business, Shaqodoon has received over 1 million calls in the last three months on the COVID-19 call center we set up for the minister of health in Somaliland and Puntland. If we engage the Ministry of Trade and Chamber of commerce and publicly launch this service the public strategically, we expect a large number of businesses accessing both services and creating to job creations.
Although the business information service will not necessarily directly be creating jobs, however, it will contribute to it as with other supporting services provided to businesses. We expect about 500 entrepreneurs or informal business ready to formalize their business to call per month and access key information of which 5 (2 new, 3 existing) business registered through the ministry as a result. These will then be established and create 1-3 new job opportunities. These five businesses will be supported as they establish their business. To ensure a collaborative approach between Shaqodoon and the Ministry, an MoU will be signed with the Ministry with the focus of getting information about people who register while coming through the platforms. Shaqodoon will also provide some capacity-building support to the ministry which could some hardware i.e. computers, furniture and stipend for a person manning the information line if the caller opted to relate to the ministry. We also expect a lot of people who want to try out the service or spam callers. The service will not be toll-free to ensure longer-term sustainability of the service beyond the project life cycle.
More Details
Project Director: Mustafa Othman | Email
Location: Somaliland
Start Date: December 2020