By Yero S. Bah
A young Gambian Technology entrepreneur Mr. Ousman Faal, is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Faalen Technologies, located within Gambia Mall Office No. 18 in Bakoteh.
With the aphorism-‘Tech Guys Without Borders’, the young ICT expert and his team conduct web designing and hosting, and also providing amazing technological products and services to clients in the country.
It offers two months’ intensive video editing, graphic design and web-design courses with “affordable course fees” for clients.
CEO Faal had recently created a new Gambia Skills Directory called skills.gm, with the sole purpose of profiling workers from the informal sector, reasoning these people have no platforms to showcase their skills or expertise in the Gambia.
He explained that though there are numerous other online job searching sites, but such platforms mostly focus more on white-collar jobs searchers in the country, and those in the informal sector are left out.
The Faalen Technologies founder noted that, there are great Gambians in the informal sector (of the economy) who have skills but lacked the proper personal branding, which has hindered their visibility status in their respective domains. “Skills.gm comes to help these people,” said Faal.
According to the young ICT expert, the new job-seeking platform doesn’t ask much of a personal data such as CVs like in other platforms. But only simple information about one’s work and skills plus contact details and photo, he disclosed to this medium.
On payment for services, the head of Faalen Technologies said it ranges from D115 to D915, depending on the category one subscribed to. He, therefore, encouraged people to join the site to expose their skills and expertise to prospective clients.
The Founder/Manager at Gambia Skills Directory went on: “We are creating a local employment platform different from others like Fiverr and freelancer.com which focuses more on people with IT skills.”
On his thoughts on technology in the Gambia, Faal believes Gambians are still behind, but he added that people are “growing up”.
“Gambians are seeing the importance of technology especially in this coronavirus period,” he argued. Observing that now the country has more brilliant programmers, the young Technologist however opined that they suffering from “poor personal branding”.
The Faalen Tech. founder, who is also an IT lecturer at Nusrat, posited that government needs to make IT examinable internationally in schools for students to change their mentality over it. He cited countries like Nigeria and Ghana, where he said, “IT is internationally examinable” in all secondary schools examinations.
CEO Faal admitted that the coronavirus pandemic has hampered his business. He admonished Gambians to avoid using social media platforms to create fake news thereby causing panic in society.
