Open Source Compass
MLC Voyager | Tabiya US
Tabiya builds open-source digital public infrastructure: an AI career guidance tool, an inclusive skills taxonomy, and a job-matching engine — that makes the skills of informal and unpaid workers visible and usable in labour markets for the first time. Deployed across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in partnership with government employment services, NGOs, and job platforms. The tools address two interconnected challenges: the inability of young people in low- and middle-income countries to articulate skills gained outside formal employment, and the failure of conventional labour market systems to recognise those skills on the demand side, together the root cause of persistent skills mismatch and youth unemployment across the Global South.
5,000,000 Lives Impacted
Tabiya's open-source tools are reshaping how young people, particularly young women and first-time jobseekers, enter and navigate labour markets. By recognising skills from informal and unpaid work that conventional systems ignore, Tabiya enables young people to articulate their full economic contribution for the first time, building both a credible skills CV and the confidence to pursue formal employment.
To date, Tabiya's tools have reached 5 million jobseekers. Compass, the AI career guidance agent, has served over 8,000 job seekers at half the time and a quarter of the cost of equivalent human-delivered career counselling. In South Africa, Tabiya co-created the Inclusive Livelihoods Taxonomy as a national public good with Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, directly improving hiring practices for one of the world's highest youth unemployment rates, 55.8% for those aged 18 to 34. In Ethiopia, HaHuJobs deployed Tabiya's classifier to transform vacancy data for public employment services, making the demand side of the labour market legible for the first time in that context.
All tools are released under an MIT licence as Digital Public Goods, meaning any government, NGO, or job platform can adopt, localise, and build on them without cost. A randomised control trial measuring employment outcomes is currently underway in South Africa and Kenya.
The Innovation
Tabiya's product suite comprises four modular, open-source tools that together form a complete skills intelligence infrastructure for labour markets in low- and middle-income countries.
The Inclusive Livelihoods Taxonomy is the foundation, an ESCO-compatible classification framework containing 3,689 validated relationships between unpaid work activities and formal sector occupations. The Livelihoods Classifier, an NLP pipeline, automatically extracts skills, occupations, qualifications, experience, and domain from unstructured text and maps them to the Taxonomy. Compass, the AI career guidance agent, engages job seekers in natural dialogue, extracts skills from all forms of work, and generates a professional skills report. In Zambia, the implementation extends Compass with additional agents that deliver short, modular job preparation courses alongside skills profiling. Horizon, the matching and analytics engine, standardises employer vacancy data to the same taxonomy, enabling transparent and explainable job matching.
Deployed across South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Latin America, Tabiya's tools serve government employment services, NGOs, and job platforms as Digital Public Goods under an MIT licence. Scaling plans include multilingual support, voice integration, and expansion across additional LMIC geographies.
Implemented in
Low-and-middle-income countries
Get in touch
Nyambura Kariuki, Director of Technology & Community Impact
About Tabiya
Tabiya is a nonprofit organisation that builds open-source engines and standards to unlock economic opportunity for all, operating at the intersection of digital public infrastructure, AI, and global development. Its mission is to make labour markets more efficient, equitable, and inclusive, with a particular focus on youth employment in low- and middle-income countries. Tabiya's tools are designed as Digital Public Goods, freely available for governments, NGOs, and job platforms to adopt, localise, and build upon, so that the benefits of digital labour market infrastructure reach the workers who need it most.
