According to the UN nearly 20% of young Palestinians are neither in the labour force or in formal education.

Even for those youths who have successfully graduated, employment is by no means guaranteed. Furthermore, the strained economy cannot cope with 40,000 new graduate seeking work each year and, prior to this service, there was no corporate culture offering internships or training to meet the yawning skills gap. So, each year, there are thousands of people, without the right skillsets, flooding a stalled and hobbled jobs market.

To meet this challenge, Souktel partnered with the World Bank and the Palestinian Ministry of Education to launch a mobile JobMatch service on four Palestinian college campuses. JobMatch became the universities’ first-ever job search service. Three of the four campuses had never offered any type of career resources to their students. After 12 months of use by 400 new college graduates, over 25% of service users had found work/internships through Souktel (compared with a 15% success rate at traditional HR firms); 60%+ of employers using the service had cut hiring time and costs by over 50%. Students quickly embraced the service for its ease of use and cultural relevance – women could find jobs without having to travel to the city, and job searching via SMS could be quickly done between classes or while on the go. Since the initial pilot, JobMatch has grown into a nation-wide service, with 10,000+ daily users across the West Bank.