You can’t uberize employer of record. It’s a very personal service that we offer. It’s employing people and paying them salaries, and you’ve got to have that personal touch. Employ Africa started in 2010. We started in the spare bedroom of my house at the time.
We’re a services company. We navigate the complexities of working in Africa from tax compliance of payroll, social securities. We navigate the labour laws for them, as well as contractor management for the various projects. We now sitting at approximately just over 60 staff who are permanently employed by the group across continental Africa, with some staff now employed in Ireland and the USA. And I think that’s a big part of what we do.
All of our clients have individual account managers who look after them and are really concerned about their operations, and the people working on their projects. Working in Africa is tough. There are a myriad of rules, regulations and processes that companies need to follow. And there’s various languages as well. There is no one book that you can go to to learn how to run a business or employ people in various African countries.
We started developing that at an early stage as we were moving into different countries. We spent a lot of time doing our due diligence and research around those countries and started putting in processes on how to employ people, how to bring in experts from other African countries to do work in country and on the projects. That, for us was the turning point of starting to develop a quality management system where today all our processes, all our documents, has been placed into a quality management system. With that, we were able to successfully navigate the ISO 9001 audit. We are very proud of being accredited with our ISO 9001 certification.
It shows the commitment and the drive that our people in Employ Africa have and the commitment that they have for the business. It has taken us 13 years to get to this point. It’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of documentation that we’ve had to compile and put together as part of our quality management system. Our clients, when they work with Employ Africa, they know that they’re dealing with the experts in Africa. We have the skills, the knowledge, and now the accreditation to back that up.
I want to see change. I want to see the skills of Africa being utilised.
