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BPIFrance awards isahit the Special Prize at the Deauville Green Awards

Winner of the Deauville Green Awards for the Bpifrance Special Prize, isahit is a platform that allows companies to outsource digital tasks that cannot be performed by artificial intelligence. The HITers community is made up of African women who want to add a supplement to their income to finance a personal project.

Isabelle Mashola, co-founder, talks about isahit. Discover her interview!

How does the isahit platform work?
The customer submits to us a complex digital project that our engine breaks down into micro-tasks. We then do what we call crowdsourcing: we use women from the HITers community to do all the tasks. Each woman then chooses the micro-task she wants to work on. It can be for example to check Linkedin links, or to recognize meal trays on images in order to exercise a robot thanks to the machine learning.

How did the isahit company come into being?
It all started with a trip to Cameroon with friends. We are committed to the project to help women entrepreneurs develop their business. For example, some were cereal processors and we bought them dryers, others worked in sewing and the association gave them sewing machines.

We realised that what really gave meaning to the lives of these women was the development of their personal project. I then joined forces with Philippe Coup-Jambet, with whom we imagined a digital solution that would enable women to create a real lever of independence for launching their business from a distance.

Isahit was conceived in June 2016, and our first customer arrived in January 2017.

What convinces your customers to call on you?
We offer a practical, agile and competitive solution; these are the aspects that attract companies the most. The social aspect adds a lot of value but is not the main reason why they want to meet us.

We position our service today as a technology for good, i.e. a technology that serves society as it grows. Today our customers are in Africa, Canada, France, Switzerland and Belgium.

Who are the women who work for isahit?
These are women with two years of higher education who want to obtain additional income to finance a life project, such as expanding their field, setting up their own business or continuing their studies. These women cannot work more than 100 hours a month.

For example, we recently worked with Stéphanie, who is in her first year of master's studies in Dakar, and who travels four hours every day to get there. Stephanie has three projects: first to buy a PC, then to buy glasses, and finally to leave her roommate to take a new one closer to her university. Isahit then allows him to finance these projects to better study.

Why can women only work 100 hours a month?
It would be tempting for them to make isahit their main source of income by working more than a hundred hours a day, but isahit's goal is to remain a springboard for their life project.

Read the rest of the interview on BPI FRANCE