köprü by Grup Gündoğarken
Summary of the Project
We aimed to create an online market system that will contribute to the economic independence of the Syrian refugee women in Turkey. We will cooperate with the vocational courses that municipalities and other refugee foundations provide for the education of the refugees themselves. By creating a production model based on the refugee women that either still get their education or already got their profession certificates, we will sell these productions to the consumers and redistribute the money between refugee women and our initiative to ensure both these women get the most possible amount of money and our project becomes self-sustainable.
Facts on the Project Progress
köprü aims to reveal the production potentials of refugee women and turn their competencies into income channels. For that purpose, we will make collaborations with vocational courses and we will add functionality to their labor and production. We will make a website to sell our designed products that have stories of refugees. Our system will be rooted in our 6-month action plan. At the end of the first month, our tracking system will be operated effectively, and every graduate woman will continue production, without breaking off. In that way, our stakeholders will be increased. At the end of the third month, we will be accepted by acceleration programs and strengthen our system. Within the first five-month, we will be able to address a constant consumer group due to our rapid developments. At the end of our action plan, we will spread our operations starting from The Marmara Region.
Target vs. Actual Accomplishments
We have achieved to develop and complete the theoretical base of köprü project through long hours of extensive field research and consultation as targeted in the planning stage. Virtual store prototype conceptualized in the first hand; then materialized according to pre-established designs. köprü project has successfully concluded the theoretical phase of working principles of virtual stores. However, we could not establish healthier connections with vocational courses, which are the essential source of the production process, due to COVİD-19 pandemics. Overall, we managed to complete a major part of the project sufficiently and successfully.
Resources and Stakeholders
During the project, we used both online resources, talked to people who have been already working on our subject of interest, and people who are affected by the issue that we work on. In meetings with people, we talked face to face and through online applications. During the meetings, we got very important insights to develop our project. On the other hand, we made desk research in which we used websites like ‘Konda’ to get statistical data. In addition to these, while working on the project, we used the application ‘Mural’ which is very useful to work together as a group. Moreover, we created a website as a prototype of our project through ‘Marvel’ which is very practical and easy to use application. In the final stage of our project, preparation of our project presentation, we received the support of websites like ‘Canva’ and ‘Flaticon’ to design our slides. During all these studies, time was the most important and limited resource, however, by virtue of attentive planning and willingness to work as a team in our project, we managed the time efficiently with the help of also technological tools.
Analysis
Firstly, we have chosen refugee women as subject of the problem which will be worked on. We contacted the institutions operated in this area such as Maide Mutfak, Mülteciler Derneği, Joon etc. We talked with refugees face to face and we got voice and written notes. We asked our questions in a way that we did not get definitive answers. Through the institutions, our conversation with refugees made them more comfortable explaining their problems. When we created an opportunity for individuals to talk about their problems, we realized that the written result was a scattered and causal list of problems. In the next phase, we categorized these issues and identified those containing causality. We also used academic texts and websites during our weeks of interviews with refugees.
Social Impact and Innovation
Migration is a phenomenon that has existed throughout human history, and consequences of migration have caused better or worse situations for people based on a lot of factors that cause migration and resulted by migration. While migration has been an enormous impact on people, we experience these impacts at first hand because of the geopolitical position of Turkey. As in recent years, Syrian migration has been occurring, and Turkey is one of the countries that have been affected excessively by this movement. Because of the lack of resources, most of the Syrian refugees are living in very bad conditions, especially women and children are the groups that have been influenced poorly. Under these circumstances, we created köprü in order to increase their living standards and to help them in getting easily contact with local people. köprü is an online sales platform in which Syrian women can sell their hand-made products, and can improve their economic conditions. Through this process, köprü work together with already established workshops and associations; thus, köprü aims to increase the productivity and sustainability of these workshops and associations. Increasing productivity and sustainability of already established initiatives is a very important goal for us because these actions that are not changing lives people and not creating better conditions for them, unfortunately, create an unreliableness towards these initiatives and also wastes time, money and energy. By translating this time, money, and energy into sustainable and effective results through köprü, we aim to open a new path for people toward better lives and a hopeful future.
Risks and Issues
As we mentioned before, köprü project aims to provide sustainable economic development for disadvantaged Syrian women. Therefore, our target group is Syrian female refugees. It was very challenging to establish a virtual market for the development of refugees while a significant portion of the Turkish people suffered from similar economic issues. Some people react too strongly against our project and advocate that “pain and gain are national” thus citizens’ needs should be prioritized. It was difficult for us to break down the prejudices during the field research. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic was another source of challenge that our team has faced; especially during the interview and feedback stage, we couldn’t provide a dependable and sincere communication environment via online conferencing. This situation made it difficult to understand genuine reasons and underlying causes of addressed problems. But, overall it became an inestimable experience for all of us.
Needs
To achieve our project, firstly and most importantly; we need a pecuniary source to reach our producer, buy raw materials, define designing, and provide logistics. Secondly, we need moral support from our school on our collaborations, as a reference. Our collaborations are essential to start and sustain our production. Then, we need advertising from different platforms, like KoçAilem, to reach more consumers.
Schedule
We managed to meet the deadlines mostly. However, we are just at the beginning of the road. First, we need to create a tracking system where we can integrate the refugee women that have graduated from these courses to the production process. Then, we need to increase the number of facilities we will work and spread throughout Istanbul. Then, we will be applying to enterprise acceleration programs and work with professionals to figure out how we can develop our ideas about the future. After that, we will try to increase our acquaintance with the consumers so that they become our regular customers. Then, we are aiming to extend our operations to the Marmara region.
Team Members: Alev Gökdemir, Ecem Türkü Taşkıran, Emre Açıkgöz, Ertuğrul Ba,ş M. Samet Kuru
