Sikoba — Update #29

In November/December, we have been working on the ground in Lima to strengthen our ties with our Peruvian partners.

In November, our Head of Operations Roman Alwasiak travelled to Lima, Peru, and spent almost 2 weeks there working with our local partners. Among Roman’s activities:

• Finalize setup of the legal entity “Asociación Shikoba”, which is now the formal name of the group of women that have previously operated informally as “Banco Mujer”;
• Hand over a donation from De Kär, the operators of the Beki local currency, to the association;
• Analyse the current needs of the association and its team members;
• Sikobapay mobile app training sessions, and analysis of additional features needed/requested by users;
• Workshops and help with business plan development for a Barber School in Jicamarca, whose students have also been testing the Sikobapay mobile app;
• Initial contacts with the National University of Cajamarca.

In parallel, Roman also gave several English language lessons to students of the barber school and found time to set up a cooperation agreement between a primary school in Lima (Colegio Mater Purissima) and and his local primary school in Gdańsk (STOII) — this last activity being of course independent of Siokba.

Going forward, we see three main areas of cooperation:

• Help with the development of Asociación Shikoba in cooperation with the Women Innovation Network (WIN) in Georgia, Ukraine and Poland, the Ignatianum University in Krakow and the University of Cajamarca. In particular, we will help Asociacion Shikoba to get involved in WIN activities and also with fundraising;
• Sikobapay implementation in Lima and in rural areas of the Cajamarca region (the latter in cooperation with the National University of Cajamarca).
• Development of models for women entrepreneurship, based on the case study of the Barber school managed by Olga Castillo

Minor update to the SikobaPay app

Following requests from our users in Peru, the mobile app now detects the device language during the initial install and automatically switches to that language if it is supported by the app. Note that the supported languages are currently: English, French, German, Luxembourgish, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.