These values lie at the heart of Onja because what’s important is not just working towards our mission - it’s how we choose to do that. How we do business, how we treat each other, what we consider when making important decisions. These values help guide us as we accelerate Madagascar’s development by training as many talented, underprivileged young people as possible. Our values are both about identifying who we currently are, as well as who we aspire to be. Being able to define and articulate these values, and share them with our supporters, is an important and exciting step. Because our values reflect our whole team, we engaged all of our people at Onja in their development - from asking what they believed our values to be, to helping refine the meaning and wording of each one. Involving the whole team in this process was important to us as it allows everyone to feel a kind of ownership of the values, and more buy-in when it comes to living them in our day-to-day work. Onja’s heart is our people, and they know better than anyone else what values we live in our work every day, and where we want to be in the future. These values reflect our unwavering commitment to our mission and our promise to act in accordance with who we are. We are excited to share them with you.
“We believe that love is the fuel to all good deeds and the essence to life itself. Love lets us put our mission before ourselves and have a meaningful impact that will burn bright long after we are gone. This doesn’t mean love is always easy, and we know that love sometimes looks like making difficult decisions. But we try to have love in everything we do.”
This value comes first, because if we are thinking and acting from a place of love, then everything else tends to follow naturally.
Our common goal is to help underprivileged youth to get the same opportunities we had, so we work hard and we don’t give up, even when things can seem impossible.
This value supports Onja’s mission by making sure everyone recognises the gravity of what we do and all play our part and work together to make Onja succeed.
“We uphold our commitments. We align what we say and what we do, live by our word and stick to our values even when it might be easier not to.”
When working in a team, integrity is essential to everyone playing their part so the whole organisation can function well. This is a value that covers the way that we work, and also how we treat one another and the environment we spend our time in.
“Our team members are chosen from all over Madagascar and the world and have different backgrounds and upbringings. So far from home, we support each other like family.”
At Onja, we like to make sure everyone feels welcome. We hold regular team-building days full of fun activities, share meals together at campus, and travel around Madagascar together.
“Humility allows us to put our mission above ourselves, and to connect and understand people from different walks of life. We keep our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds: Understanding where we come from and being grounded to that, while dreaming big and believing we can achieve what others say is impossible.”
Onja’s mission is what ties everyone together. Humility guides us to keep this mission front and centre of everything we do. By being humble, we acknowledge the importance of everyone’s role in working towards our goals.
“At the core of Onja's model is giving back to the community. Through gratitude, we not only appreciate the opportunity and support we receive but also commit to contributing, ensuring our mission advances and positively impacts the community we serve.”
Consciously practising gratitude allows us to think about what we have and be thankful for our work, our community, and the mission we’re trying to achieve.
"The majority of our team and stakeholders are Malagasy so we strive to ensure that Malagasy culture is given an importance that reflects this. While Malagasy culture is our baseline, we have a unique blend of Malagasy and western cultures, leveraging the strengths of both."
We sit between two worlds, so we make an effort to all understand each other. For our International staff, we adjust our communication style to work well with our Malagasy colleagues, who tend to have a softer and less abrupt approach than is often used in the West. When we meet in person, we like to sit on hand-woven Malagasy mats (tsihy) outside, to connect better to the culture we’re in, the place we work, and each other.
Most decisions regarding Onja’s students carefully consider Malagasy culture, often starting by asking ourselves ‘what would their parents think of this?’. This is what guides our operations, even if some of the ways we end up doing things differ from the ideas of a Western perspective.
Sometimes, to reach towards the mission, we have to compromise between cultures. For example, Onja’s campus is fully English speaking. The immersive environment helps the developers reach a professional level of English much faster than just a few lessons in a classroom each week. International staff are offered Malagasy lessons to learn more about the culture they are also immersed in. This has also created a great culture of learning and interesting discussions over lunch as we talk about the linguistic differences between Malagasy and English.
“Our mission is purely social, but we can only maximise our impact through a thriving social enterprise. We are a non-profit but operate like a lean startup. This means we strive for outstanding results and continuous improvement and bring exceptional value to our clients.”
Onja’s self-funding model is one of the things that make us unique, and it amplifies our impact by allowing us to focus resources on advancing the mission rather than fundraising. Performing well, bringing value to our clients, so that we can continue to create impact through our model, is central to everything we do.
Developing these values was an exciting, cross-organisational effort by the whole Onja team. Everyone had input into what the values were and their specific wording. These values are an amalgamation of everyone’s efforts. It was a process that took a long time, but we are incredibly proud of the outcome, and to have organisational values that really represent Onja as a whole.
We’d like to thank the whole Onja team for their time and their insights in developing these values, and are excited to have them as front and centre of our work going forward.
Learn about how Onja's model connects talented young people with remote work in US and European countries...
Learn more about what it's like to work at Onja, and to live as part of our community in beautiful Toamasina.
We talk about why it's valuable to build a socially responsible tech team and explore actionable steps for organisations to achieve this goal, drawing insights from our experience in training talented and underprivileged youth to become software developers in Madagascar.
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