Matina Razafimahefa
Co-Founder & CEO, Sayna
Matina was born on January 04 in Côte d'Ivoire. Daughter of a doctor father and an engineer mother in polytechnic, she is the co-founder and CEO of SAYNA, a start-up born from a childhood dream and a project shared with her mother Nirina Rahoeliaribahy.
She grew up in Madagascar and left Tana at the age of 10 to study tennis at the Centre Educatif Nantais pour Sportifs in France. She was a Madagascar tennis champion at 7 or 8 years old, she is also regional tennis champion of the Loire region at 14 years old.
Her skills in sports fuelled her desire to take on new challenges. But still, at the age of 15, she discovered the French public high school and noticed the flagrant difference of the educational structure in place compared to the one in Madagascar. From there, but also following a leadership conference in London, the trigger for her entrepreneurial adventure occurred.
Continuing her studies in Political Science, she joined the Sorbonne in Paris. Her ambition is greater than anything else, she is self-taught and immerses herself in the culture of business, company creation and start-ups. As a result, SAYNA was born in 2017, the first Franco-African Edtech & crowdsourcing platform: linking organized IT projects divided into micro-tasks to a community of pre-trained developers and continuing education. Lacking capital in its early days, a crowdfunding campaign was launched in early 2018 to boost the project and enable some acquisitions. Her perseverance, motivation and brilliant initiatives earned her the title of "Best Social Entrepreneur" at the age of 20; a competition organized by the International Organization of the Francophonie, in partnership with Incubons.
Her ambition is to enable millions of Africans, regardless of their situation, to have access to quality digital education and job opportunities around the world, without the CV being a barrier. Her second ambition is to create profitable business that will revolutionize the lives of millions of people and create jobs. "It is not given to everyone to benefit from a qualitative education in Madagascar" she affirms, and it is this spirit of equity and equality that SAYNA advocates through a digital training accessible to all.
As a young woman, she had to face many challenges and it was necessary to strive for development and to control growth. There have been both bitter failures and great victories, but all of this has forged the person she has become today. Her challenges and each step of her journey have allowed her to progress, to grow and to give the best of herself.
SAYNA aims to revolutionize access to the job market via a crowdsourcing solution and to make education in new technologies accessible to all via the internet and very attractive prices.