Community development, youth empowerment and volunteering have been areas of interest to Dania Al Masri and Fedaa Alhassan. Therefore, they decided to establish a digital community of generous volunteers under one app called Khadoum. Khadoum is an Arabic word that means serviceable or giving.

Al Masri tells WAYA about how they thought of the idea for ​​Khadoum: “We received messages from youth and companies interested in volunteering. We were studying these charitable interests and linking them to opportunities in the market or designing a voluntary initiative that suits their interests. As time passed, there was an increase in these voluntary needs and opportunities. Thus it became necessary to create a solution to enable youth to volunteer anytime and anywhere.”

The founders wanted to make volunteering easy and accessible to users. Al Masri says “We are trying to create a community that encourages volunteers to give, by adding a friend, writing a comment, and sharing the tasks that the volunteers have completed in addition to the feature of the award system”.

The co-founders launched the app in Saudi Arabia with the aim of connecting youths with volunteer opportunities. This is done with the help of Khadoum’s 75-day challenge cards which gives volunteers daily tasks to accomplish. Volunteers can document their journey through the app. AlMasri says: “In every card there is a volunteer challenge. The individual must choose a card and complete the task, and document it through the application”. Al Masri explains to WAYA that the app has 3 main advantages: “documenting the tasks on the cards, the ability to access challenges and daily tasks, and the volunteer can request a volunteer certificate when a task is completed.”

Over 17,000 users have used the app and they have carried out more than 12,000 volunteer tasks. Al Masri and Alhassan are aiming to reach one million volunteers in the Arab world in the next three years.

Al-Masri concludes the interview by telling WAYA, “We believe that technology must be used to empower societies. Khadoum is an example of an app that we can use to solve the problems that exist in our society”.