Para-employer
Being a para-employer: development of an interactive digital platform to support beneficiaries of the assistance contribution from invalidity insurance in their role as employers
Type of project: Feasibility study
Disability concerned: Anyone eligible for the assistance contribution
Topics: Digital accessibility, Autonomy, Support for the autonomous role of employer, Legal aspects
Status: Completed
Faced with the complexity of the tasks involved in being an employer and the difficulties of accessing technology that enables people with disabilities to carry out these tasks, this project aims to study the possibility of developing an innovative digital tool to support recipients of the disability insurance assistance contribution, in order to tackle the problem of non-use.
The assistance contribution as defined in the LAI enables people with disabilities who receive impotence allowance to hire assistants to help them return to or remain in their own homes.
The granting of this assistance requires an employment contract to be concluded between the beneficiary with a disability and the assistant. The beneficiary with a disability must then become the employer and take on all the obligations that this entails (recruitment, drawing up employment contracts, salary and end-of-year statements, affiliation to the various social insurance schemes, etc.).
The aim of this project was twofold:
- to identify the problems most frequently encountered by para-employers in the context of contracts with people hired as assistants
- to determine the value and structure of a digital platform that could centralise and simplify the many procedures involved in concluding an employment contract.
The development of such a platform will therefore require a twofold innovation: centralisation and simplification of the legal and administrative procedures, in collaboration with the bodies concerned (insurance companies, tax authorities, IV offices, etc.) to ensure that they are understandable to as many people as possible, and digital accessibility for different forms of disability.
The participatory methodology has proved to be an essential approach to understanding the reality of para-employers and their families, avoiding the development of unverified hypotheses.
The co-construction and iterative process between the members of the team, all of whom had different perspectives and experience, both in terms of their training and their professional backgrounds (sociology, law, IT, social work, specialist in the contribution of assistance, people concerned), ensured that the central objective of the research was never lost from sight, namely to enable people with disabilities to experience their role as employer as an aid to their daily lives and to improving their quality of life.
The support we received from the Innovation Booster team enabled us to clarify the various stages of the project and the stages still to come, thanks in particular to the wide range of Innovation Booster partners.
Initially, a second Innovation Booster project in the form of exploratory research will refine the results obtained on the needs and different profiles of users of the future platform, while investigating existing technologies in terms of digital accessibility for people with disabilities.
The project will then be able to develop into a prototype, followed by a large-scale project to fund the development, design and production of the interactive digital platform that will centralise and simplify procedures while being accessible for people with different disabilities.
