nanWork

nanWork

Inspiration 🧠

Our inspiration rose from the stories that we heard from mothers around us. It is indeed a prominent concern in the workplace where mothers with childcare contingencies are disadvantaged from many employment opportunities. While the solution is childminding services, we have also observed that existing platforms may not have the most effective features to facilitate the interaction between mothers and childminders. It is with that in mind that our team has developed nanWork to allow for a social platform that connects mothers to childminders by integrating the social element.

With the idea of creating an interactive platform in mind, we drew inspiration from several websites, such as housetutors.sg for example. Housetutors.sg allows for the pairing of private tutors and parents on the website, requiring very little man power to do so as most of the pairing is selected and decided by the tutors and parents themselves. We see this as an efficient platform which we can adapt the concept from.

What it does 💻

It provides an automated pairing process between both mothers and nannies. First, mothers can request for a job through the platform. Afterwhich, nannies can view the list of job postings and check which job postings suits their schedule more and contact the mothers. Once both parties are agreeable on the terms, they would be able to be paired so mothers can proceed to go on to work with the ease of mind that their child is being taken care of.

How we built it 🔨

For the front end, we utilized Next.js and material UI to build the user interface and web application.

For the back end, we utilized the google technology - Firebase, to serve as the database for our web application to store the pool of nannies and mothers.

Challenges we ran into 🗻

At the initial stages, we found it hard to think of a technological prototype that might help employers to be more open to hiring women with less social mobility due to existing gender stereotypes. However, after we narrowed down the scenarios in which women may not have access to livelihood opportunities, we found out that many women from underprivileged families are unable to get jobs because of childcare contingencies and decide to focus on building a social platform that promotes social interaction between mothers and nannies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🦾

Even though most of the team was made up of relatively new coders who did not even know anything about javascript or firebase, we managed to complete the project on time.

What we learned 📕

That nothing is impossible as long as you have the heart to do good.

What's next for nanWork 🦄

We will be adding more filters to better facilitate the job searching experience of nannies. This will include: Time of the day Age of child Location And many more!

We are also looking to include a messaging feature to allow for direct communication between mothers and nannies on our platform. We would also be adding a review feature so that mothers would be able to give reviews on the nannies and also be able to make a more informed decision when finding nannies.