Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

When Mariana Costa and her partners started a web development company in Lima, Peru, she quickly learned that good web developers are hard to come by. She also noticed that, of the candidates that applied for her open positions, very few of them were women. And, while there was a very high demand for web developers, there were also millions of young people who neither went to school nor worked, and of those, 70% were women. That means that, in Peru alone, there are nearly two million young women who are out of the workforce. Many of them turn to the informal economy to make a living. With customers hungry for help, a web design studio in need of talent, and a huge supply of underemployed or unemployed women, Mariana and her partners formed Laboratoria. Laboratoria, a tech social enterprise that empowers young women by giving them access to education and work in the digital sector. They accomplish this through their codeAcademy, a five-month program that emphasizes not just coding skills but also life skills.