Trust shouldn't be the most expensive thing a tradesperson doesn't have
Informal-sector employment accounted for 19.5% of total employment in Q4 2024, while 1.9 million people were running non-VAT-registered businesses in 2023. E-SPANE starts with the practical question of how trust and verification could work in informal hiring.
By Thapelo Tlailana
Founder & Digital Solutions Specialist, Tswelopele Synergy Solutions
The problem
Finding a tradesperson or daily worker is often a trust problem as much as a skills problem. A customer wants to know who they are hiring, while a worker needs a fair opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.
What we observed
Informal work can depend heavily on word of mouth, physical hiring points and personal networks. Those mechanisms can work, but they can also make discovery and verification difficult.
The question we asked
What would a digital hiring experience look like if identity, skills, work details and payment arrangements were treated as part of the infrastructure rather than an afterthought?
Why we built E-SPANE
E-SPANE explores a marketplace for verified tradespeople and daily workers, with safety and payment controls built into the concept.
What we are testing
The prototype is testing how workers and households could discover one another, exchange relevant information and establish enough confidence to proceed.
External sources are used to ground the problem context. They are not evidence of impact from the product itself.