Team AlterContacts: Economic resilience of self-employed professionals out of work because of COVID
Channel: AlterContacts
Date: 2020-04-26

#EUvsVirus
Our idea in a nutshell: The goal of our project is to create opportunities to cover basic needs (food, shelter, medical support) for self-employed people who lost their source of income due to the pandemic. That will be done by enabling the government to outsource remote office tasks to freelancers and self-employed through existing freelance platforms. 

The text of the video pitch: 

All our team members are self-employed professionals, small business owners, and freelancers. Due to the COVID-19 our clients have cancelled and it’s unlikely to change. There is no direct financial support available for our social group. We only have enough savings for the next couple of months. But we are not asking the government for help. WE want to help the government to create new opportunities during the crisis that will allow self-employed people to earn for their food and shelter.

There are over 32 million self-employed professionals in Europe. According to the OECD report, at the beginning of the lockdown, they had enough savings to last two-three months. On average. That means that some are already at risk of poverty.  

Due to the quarantine, our offerings became irrelevant; our clients called things off. So there is simply not enough demand for what we do. Given the economic recession we have entered and the shutdown of many industries which require freelance services, such as tourism, events, restaurants -- it is not going to change soon enough. 

The International labour organization has already stated that this crisis has revealed the gaps in social protection for self-employed workers. Indeed, there is no policy covering our unemployment or sick leave. So there has to be a different way for over 15% of the highly skilled European population to earn money to cover our food, rent, medicines, and support our families.

The solution we came up with is simple. We propose for the governments to outsource remote tasks to out-of-work freelancers and self-employed professionals. 

That can be done through existing platforms for freelance work. The tasks would be time-bound in hours. The reward can be in-kind through vouchers from business partners or blockchain. 

As for the type of tasks, right now due to the pandemic, the public offices are overwhelmed by the flow of incoming information and requests. There are not enough people employed to process them timely. Why not outsource that extra work to the highly skilled professionals who are desperately trying to find opportunities to earn?

In the last 48 hours we came up with this idea; got insights from mentors on legal aspects and identified potential risks; gathered data from online sources such as UN, OECD, Eurostat, and ILO; did market research on available alternatives; and designed the way to prototype our solution.

We are ready to go forward with its implementation. All we need is one government agency to do the pilot with; one Supply Chain Partner in food and household goods; one existing Digital Platform for freelance work to become the partner of the project. 

The Pilot project could be done in The Netherlands where the share of self-employed people is the highest in Europe, over 20% of the population, according to Eurostat. In that case, we can invite Albert Heijn as a Supply Chain Partner; and Freelance.nl as a Digital partner. 

At the beginning of this decade, entrepreneurship was seen as a key to European growth and competitiveness. So the survival of this layer of the population is vital and primordial to maintain social stability. Freelancers and independent professionals are the capillary circulations of value that touches almost all families.