Case Study: Yoma

Yoma is a digital marketplace that opens up a world of opportunities to young people.

Yoma is a partnership ecosystem, enabled by technology, that creates pathways that improve youth’s employability. This collaborative approach seeks to disrupt the fragmented youth development landscape with young people using a unique digital identity to seamlessly navigate opportunities to learn, earn, and impact their environment and communities.

The project brings together approved opportunity providers and offers a platform to create visibility for their respective opportunities. Youths are able to complete the opportunities and store these verified skills and qualifications in their digital CV backpack.

To address this issue, UNICEF and Foundation Botnar organised workshops in 2019 with youth across Africa to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges contributing to high youth unemployment. Using a human-centered design thinking approach, youth identified two key challenges:

The technology is based on a self-sovereign identity (SSI) model, which leverages verified credentials that represent skills, education and work experience. A verified credential enables third parties to verify the validity of the credential, improving the legitimacy of the digital CV.

As a result, Youth are offered a portal to navigate various opportunities, and upon completion receive a verified credential. These credentials, along with self-attested information, form their digital CV.

This offers Youth a blockchain-verified digital CV, which increases validity, and therefore employability.

• We gathered regular requirements by having discussions and workshops with country offices.
• We conducted user interviews and regular testing with Yoma youth.
• Additionally, we collaborated with third-party user research initiatives, such as the Vienna University of Economics and Business, to design for privacy.

In partnership with the Trust Over IP Foundation, we focused on creating a persona centred around Inclusive Design. This means designing for human diversity in terms of ability, language, culture, gender and age.

Keeping the above research in mind, I redesigned the Yoma experience — starting with wireframes to test and iterate on, and then moving into high-fidelity design, with the following features:

Youth can personalise their recommendations based on their chosen learning journey, and search for opportunities by topic.

Jobs are now recommended based on your skills match and learning pathway. Job categories are also available to help guide you and see what skills are in demand. If you don’t have the necessary skills to apply for your dream job, Yoma can recommend opportunities that will teach you those skills.

Yoma can help guide you on your journey to your desired career path outcome and the opportunities that will get you there.

Stand out as an applicant with a verified CV of work experience, qualifications, and opportunities — giving employers confidence that the courses and skills you've gained are genuine and trustworthy.

As an opportunity provider, you have the following features available:

• View and manage current opportunities.
• Add new opportunities.
• Manage and verify successful participants.

View participants across all opportunities or search and filter by opportunity. If necessary, applicants can be batch approved.

To be a successful candidate for a job, you need to adhere to the verification policy requirements set up in the Super Admin Portal.

• Working with new technology and its associated constraints.
• Not using overly complicated jargon that might confuse platform users.
• Working with multiple country offices with different requirements.

• Advocating for data privacy in a world where identity fraud is rampant.
• Access to UNICEF partner contacts for information gathering and learning.
• Working with the Trust Over IP Foundation to feature Yoma as a working SSI use case.
• Getting to know the unique challenges of Yoma Youth and overcoming them with technology and innovation.
• Being the brand custodian for Yoma and maintaining a consistent brand presence, attributes, and tone across various public-facing media.

In Nigeria alone, Yoma connected more than 500,000 young people to learning, skills building and livelihood opportunities in 2025. Young people earned credentials, explored digital skills and took part in challenges that created tangible value in their communities.

This momentum was driven by Young People’s Action Teams, who brought Yoma into schools, communities and youth networks through peer led mobilisation. Supported by UNICEF Nigeria, Generation Unlimited Nigeria and an ecosystem of partners, Nigeria became one of Yoma’s fastest growing markets, demonstrating what is possible when youth leadership, partnerships and digital opportunity come together.