How to earn money online?

This question has popped out many times during the training and focus group interviews so I decided to offer a short session to everyone interested in learning about content creation and how to earn money online. After all many young people are struggling with finding work in the village and would be nice to expand the job possibilities of creative individuals who are not so keen on agriculture, driving bodas (motorbike taxis), making bricks or braids. For example, I have Annette in the digital competencies course, who writes short stories and earns living with cooking chapatis (Indian bread-like food). How wonderful it would be to share those stories with others, earn a bit of money, and who knows where this will lead her to. Also, the head of PAPO Josphato was really interested to hear about different possibilities as he needs to find a stable income for his organization in order to keep up with the training in the future.




So the idea was fixed and dates were set and as we now have more muzungus from my home country in Shianda we decided that we will do it together with Margit-an Estonian IT and Mathematics teacher. This was not the first experience organizing training with Margit a week ago we did a zoom workshop about teaching and money management in Uganda. That was fun and interactive so I was excited to organize another session with her. Also, both of us have some experience with the topic, but we are far from being experts in the field. As Margit nicely put it at the beginning of the workshop if we would be earning tons of money online we would probably be on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean. Or maybe in my case having a nice jungle School in a beautiful eco-community somewhere in the tropics. Nevertheless, our knowledge combined was more than enough to spark some interest among the youth of Shianda. After all they came with absolute zero knowledge of online jobs. We have a job module in the training, but this is more focused on applying for traditional jobs via different Kenyan job portals.




The session itself went well-we talked about different social media platforms, cross-marketing, getting likes or fans, vlogging, YouTubers, and influencers. But also about stock photography, different sites for creative people (Etsy, fieverr etc.), Paypal , and taxes. I guess in the following weeks some of the participants might approach us again as we did not dive deep into every aspect, but rather gave ideas and showed different sites. Plus explained that this is not something that will enable you to earn a lot from the beginning, but it is rather a lot of free work at the beginning to get to a certain level to be able to earn in the future. Hopefully, this will not take their enthusiasm away and we will be able to see some of the participants researching the topics at PAPO computer lab or taking stock images in the streets of Shianda as we discovered that there are no images of Shianda in Shutterstock or Alamy.