Benin: Meeting with Hadjara Idriss, founder of Sewema

Co-founded by Hadjara Idriss, a young Nigerian woman living in Benin, Sewema is a training institute that offers entrepreneurs, employees or other project leaders practical training of 2 to 6 weeks, whose mission is to help them acquire the skills they need. experiences and skills required to develop their business or career and other content delivery service useful to entrepreneurs to enable them to create high-growth businesses.

Introduce yourself and your journey (briefly)

Hello, I am Nigerian Hadjara Idriss, living in Benin. Graduate of a Master in Software Architecture. Graduated from WHISPA, a program initiated by ETRILABS and TEKXL, which offers a free and motivated young woman a complete and free one-year training in the field of web programming, digital marketing and web design.

In 2016 I worked freelance for a few months for a French company. Then I co-founded mentorat.club a platform that connects young project leaders with experts in the field, so that they accompany them by sharing with them their expertise and experience and help them to increase their chance of success. Today in addition to mentoring, I co-founded Sewema.

What is your project and its mission?

Sewema is declined in two forms:

An easily accessible platform with or without an internet connection, which offers useful content to entrepreneurs to enable them to create high-growth businesses.
A training institute named Sewema Insitute which offers practical training of 2 to 6 weeks, which gives you the necessary experiences and skills to develop a business or career

Our mission at Sewema is “Being an agent of change that transforms entrepreneurs so they can reach their full potential and create successful businesses.”

How did you get the idea to start your business?

On the internet today it is difficult to find complete quality content for entrepreneurs in French. We can have content everywhere, but not centralized. In addition these contents do not often adapt to the realities in Africa. That’s why we came up with the idea of creating a platform and a training institute, which offers complete and quality courses in French.

Can you introduce your team?

We are a team of 4 women:

Vanessa Lafia, Digital Marketer

Gaétane Akpodji, Content Editor

Mariline Nobre, Web developer

Hadjara Idriss, Lead developer & product manager

What is the problem solved by Sewema?

Sewema solves two problems

The first is the difficulty for French-speaking African entrepreneurs to quickly find quality content that is complete and adapted to the realities. Hence the com platform and institute.sewema.com training institute
The second is the difficulty of accessing a good internet connection, hence the offline (offline) version of Sewema.

What are the next steps ?

We launched on May 11, 2018 Sewema MVP (The online version).

This phase allowed us to listen to our customers and take their observation into account.

The next step for us is to improve the current version taking into account the observations.

Then offer more content and launched the MVP offline version of Sewema already in Cotonou then in other cities.

What do you need and how can AfrikaTech help you?

We intend to reach the diaspora and Africans living abroad who wish to create businesses in Africa. AfrikaTech can help us reach these people and increase our visibility internationally.

What are the contacts of the company? Website, email, Mobile / WhatsApp, links to social networks?