At Le Wagon, we’re putting increasing importance on Tech for Good, encouraging our students to use their technical skills not only to build their careers, but also to tackle real-world problems and create positive impact.
And when social entrepreneur Francis Fung joined our graduates for a career session, something really cool happened.
Francis’s organisation KiFor works with companies on social-impact activities that support charities and communities, single-parent families, homeless people, vulnerable children and orphanages.
During his talk, Francis introduced students to some of the social issues he encounters through his work with charities and NPOs. But he wasn’t there to give them another theoretical lecture. His challenge was practical: here are real problems, here are real organisations that need help, so what could you build?
The talk could have ended there. Instead, the conversation continued.
Shortly after the session, a team of Le Wagon Tokyo graduates volunteered to help Francis build KiFor Match, a platform designed to match donated items with people and organisations that need them.
What started as a career talk became a real collaboration: students got the chance to work on a genuine social-impact project, while Francis gained a team with the technical skills to help turn his idea into an MVP.
Francis has been impressed by how quickly the students took ownership of the project:
“The graduates’ own initiative and energy is infinite. They have been proactively running meetings, keeping each other accountable on Slack, sharing tasks, and moving the product forward around their full-time jobs.
What I’ve found most impressive is the autonomy and mutual support in the group. They’re not only building the project, but also encouraging each other through life after graduation. They’re an awesome team!”
One of the students leading the project is Katie Wood, Le Wagon Tokyo AI Software alumna who landed a job as a Software Engineer at Moneytree while volunteering for KiFor Match. Despite starting a new job, she has continued to contribute to the project.
For Katie, the project was both an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful and a chance to gain practical development experience.
“When the other volunteers and I first met, we discussed which of the three ideas we wanted to pursue, and all decided that KiFor Match was the best starting point. More personally, I decided I wanted to join the project because it was a great opportunity to get more development experience in a startup environment where we were all learning from and teaching each other.
During my job hunt, some interviewers did ask about what I was working on, and it was great to have an actual large-scale, ongoing group project to demonstrate my skills.
I think that the best way to become a better engineer is to try as many things as possible and develop alongside other engineers. I got lucky with a great group at KiFor Match that supports each other unconditionally while striving towards a greater goal. We continuously improve and encourage each other.”
Katie pitching her project at the Demo Day in March 2026
This is exactly the kind of connection Le Wagon Tokyo wants to encourage through its growing focus on Tech for Good: bringing together people who understand real-world problems with people who have the skills to build solutions.
And our commitment to Tech for Good goes beyond individual projects.
Le Wagon Tokyo offers a Tech for Good Scholarship covering 30% of our bootcamps tuition fees, sponsored by Socious, the company founded by our Web Development graduate Seira Yun.
The scholarship aims to help more people develop the technical skills they need to build solutions that can have a positive social impact.
At Le Wagon Tokyo, we believe that starting a career in tech can mean more than getting your first job. It can mean building something useful, helping a charity, solving a real problem and discovering along the way that your tech skills can make a difference beyond your own career.
And sometimes, all it takes is putting the right people in the same room.
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