Addresses SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 4 (Quality Education), and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth)
Inspiration
Over 31.4% of children in the Philippines live in poverty, and among these, approx. 70% are estimated to play videogames every day, getting addicted and ultimately wasting their time. In fact, the Philippines sports a record high screen time of over 10 hours.
Why? Because they the marginalized community typically don't have the necessary skills, knowledge and certifications to put their time to better use (like get a job).
What it does
So I, as a coffee-maker and artist, decided to start Zarabica - a coffee business dedicated to providing marginalized Filipino youth with the opportunities to develop sustainable art literacy skills through specialized art workshops for their medium of choice. The coffee I sell is used as a platform for them to showcase their final pieces, and gain access to the urban market. The profit earned from selling coffee (approx 20php/bottle) goes to fund future workshops and goes back to the people, allowing them to gain income to improve their standard of living and escape the poverty cycle. I partnered with U!Happy, an NGO for the create NGOs in the Philippines to connect me with underprivileged children across the entirety of the Philippines.
NPOs usually fundraise, earn money, then donate it. But Zarabica goes beyond that - not only does it TEACH children sustainable art skills that they can carry with them for life, it also gives them THE PLATFORM to do so (their artworks are featured on our bottles). This way, once they feel confident in their skills, they will instantly have access to an urban market that they otherwise would not have access to. Similarly, this gives them the experience and qualifications to hopefully gain scholarships or access better opportunities in the future.
How we built it
Same as previous question
Challenges we ran into
At Zarabica, I advocated against overdigitalization and addiction to technology, but am all for using technology sparingly and responsibly.
Technology is deep-rooted in my business strategy, as I use automation for operations and marketing on a daily basis. I have coded a bot to automate the entirety of my eCommerce store, which has boosted my engagement to heights I had never seen before. Similarly, search engine optimization is used as a core component of my marketing strategy, increasing my site’s organic search visibility with alt tags and metadata while automated forms are sent to customers following the placement of an order. These were made using Python and HTML.
But the parts requiring coding were the hardest. Even though I had studied the coding languages extensively, I still kept making errors or didn't know how to code something in particular. It was a continuous learning process, and I spent many countless nights calling up friends trying to figure out what went wrong.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Currently, I've sold thousands of bottles and helped upwards of 60 children. They have received approximately 70k PHP (~1300USD) in art materials, workshops, feeding programs, and as cash. In terms of further quantifying our impact, 96% of children reported an overall increase of skills, experiencing an average increase of 80% in art literacy tests taken after the workshop.
What we learned
As someone once said, "Learn until you grow, grow until you dream." As I mentioned above, the coding behind the automation processes were the most difficult for me. But in the end, I learnt how to do it quickly, and effectively. Because for every minute that automation saves for the customers, makes their lives easier, and leaves more for the children to thrive.
What's next for Zarabica
As always, I plan to continue to innovate and expand, potentially automate the production process. Specifically building robots to build my products is one way I'll use the money if I win. In this journey, I realized my love for coding, and my hope is that Zarabica continues in that direction, shifting it's goal from just reducing overdigitalization and addiction to video games to turning that negative addiction into a healthy relationship with tech.
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