It is often difficult in Egypt for residents to find trusted laborers to do maintenance jobs such as plumbing or electricity work. The problem exists due to the lack of legitimate organizations for which laborers can work, resulting in large numbers of laborers working alone or in groups, often in unfair conditions.
In an effort to change that dynamic, Cairo University's student organization Enactus CU has designed and launched the application 7erafy (which means laborer in Arabic) so it can help residents find workers in their area through a digital platform, similar to how one would use the mobile application Uber for transportation as opposed to calling a cab in the street.
The innovative idea creates a win-win situation for both residents and the laborers. Not only does the app's review system save residents a lot of the time and hassle involved in looking for someone they can trust and who can provide satisfactory service, it also helps laborers find work by creating a platform that connects them to opportunities that can help them expand their business. Therefore it aims to ensure fairness for both sides.
The app, which currently encompasses New Cairo's Fifth Settlement and the 6th of October City and is expanding, includes a built-in database of different kinds of laborers, their locations, phone numbers and working hours. It also allows users to rate their work and add laborers they know and trust to the database so other people can benefit from the shared experience.
Currently available for Android and soon to be avalabile for iOS, 7erafy started as a project by 10 creative students from Enactus CU who worked on the idea for a year. The team first conducted surveys and collected information in the areas they chose to cover to find out what the residents would require. They then went on to collect the laborers' data to move on to the technical aspects of the project.
“The idea behind the application itself plus its design, UX and UI were all conducted by us. But we needed someone to do the coding for the android and IOS applications, also we needed to create a backend that is linked to the labours’ database,” project leader Mahmoud Abdelaal Mowafy told Daily News Egypt .
Enactus is an international non-profit organization that allows university students all over the world to use entrepreneurial action and business spirit to create and implement community development projects such as 7erafy in order to make people's lives easier and better in their societies. The organization is currently operating in 36 countries and more than a thousand universities.
Enactus currently has 39 teams working in Egypt on 135 projects in different universities. Enactus CU was founded in 2006 in Cairo University's Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences and was the only governmental university team to represent Egypt in Enactus' World Cup in 2011.