Young entrepreneurs develop an App to tackle unemployment

By California Dube

University of Fort Hare Student, Lebogang Dludlu (25), and Vuyo Mbalane (25) who is enrolled for a Bachelor of Radiography in Diagnostics at Nelson Mandela University have developed a brilliant app that seeks to tackle the queuing problem and storage records.

The two entrepreneurs entered the 2019 MTN ICT challenge which propelled them to use Design thinking Methodology to develop a digital service within one of the sectors which are; Agriculture, Education and Health to assist communities.

Speaking to Student Living, the talented youngsters revealed that they selected the Health sector and physically went to the streets to engage with people and professionals from different fields.

“The emphasize stage of our research was the hardest because it took about 3 months to complete. We had to sacrifice personal activities, make use of pocket money for food to travel as weather conditions were not favorable, but we had to soldier on and, in the process some friends were lost since we spent limited time with them,” reported Dludlu and Mbalane.

Consequently, the students were selected by MTN South Africa and Enactus South Africa to be in the top 6 teams that received funding to develop their digital services on the MTN ICT challenge. As a result, they created a mobile app called Eazy2Q and the main feature of the application allows the user to request someone to queue for them. Additional features include storage of records and the ability to track your fitness.

However, the youngsters also opened up about one of the biggest hurdles they have come across along the journey. “One of the biggest obstacles we have faced was finding a developer for our Mobile App and then being able to penetrate the ICT sector when our App was ready to function. People are a bit reluctant when it comes to trying something new that is being introduced into the market,” said Dludlu.

“What motivated us to develop the App was seeing the number of people, especially the elderly and sick people who were spending long hours in queues and the number of young people that are unemployed in our communities.

We wanted to solve these problems by introducing a solution that will minimize the time that people have to spend waiting in queues and find a way to ensure that the unemployed can make money,” reported Dludlu and Mbalane.