SDG 8 and SDG 17 sit at the center of everything Project Oaysis does — because decent work is where opportunity becomes real, and partnership is how a small organization multiplies its reach.
A project, cooperative, or student initiative defines what it needs — strategy, funding direction, marketing, or technical guidance — and the SDG(s) it's working toward.
We match the initiative with an advisor or small team whose background fits, and the two sides work together through short 1:1 sessions or a longer-term collaboration.
Where an engagement succeeds, we help connect it to the wider network — other advisors, partner organizations, and, in time, the case studies and resources that let other changemakers learn from it.
By mentoring micro-entrepreneurs, advising cooperatives, and helping young people access 21st-century skills, we support inclusive economic participation — in an area the UN's own 2025 review describes as urgent.
The 2025 Expert Group Meeting on SDG 8, convened by the UN and the ILO, found that only the target on access to financial services is on a positive trajectory. Youth employment, informality, labor rights, and child labour have stagnated or regressed. Informal employment now affects over 2 billion workers globally, exceeding 89% in the least developed countries — with women and youth disproportionately affected, and 269 million young people not in education, employment, or training.
The review also points to structural pressure most advisory networks rarely address directly: wealth concentrating in intangible, digital assets rather than productive job creation; fiscal austerity limiting what governments can invest in employment and social protection; and digitalization and AI reshaping labor markets faster than skills and regulation can follow.
SDG Target 8.3 calls for "development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs)." That is, almost word for word, the work an Oaysis advisor does in a single engagement: helping one enterprise become more resilient, more formal, and more able to hire.
Grameen Bank's microcredit model, the African Development Bank's SME programs, M-Pesa's mobile-money expansion in Kenya, and the ILO's work formalizing informal businesses all point the same direction: targeted support to small enterprises measurably improves livelihoods. Oaysis operates at the advisory layer of that same movement.
Initiatives like SheTrades and Youth Co:Lab exist because generic support underserves these groups. Every Oaysis match records who is being served and why, so our own advisory network doesn't repeat that gap.
Oaysis works through NGOs, youth groups, educational institutions, and foundations, rather than around them. This is the same logic behind the EU's own Start-Up Nations Standard: a 2021 initiative asking every EU member state to adopt shared best practices — fast, low-cost business registration, easier access to finance and talent, and support through every stage of a start-up's life — because fragmented, go-it-alone policy leaves founders to solve the same problems from scratch, market by market.
We apply the same logic at a much smaller scale: rather than building parallel programs, we connect existing ones. An advisor's time, a university's resources, and an NGO's local trust compound each other far more than any single one could alone.
As advisory relationships complete their first cycles, we'll publish real case studies here — the challenge, the advisory support given, the outcome, and a testimonial from the person or organization we worked with. We publish nothing until it's real.
What the initiative was up against, in its own words.
What guidance was given, by whom, and over what period.
What changed, told by the people it changed for.
