Samasourcing

Rural Outsourcing in India

Leila Chirayath Janah — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:02:05 -0500

I'm writing from Bengal, the second region on my training circuit for Samasource's three newest partners, Usha Martin Rural Services, Anudip, and Built on Respect (in Ranchi, Kolkata, and Dharamsala, respectively).

I've trained about 60 workers so far in centers that look like this:

And this:

Our workers have incredible stories. Some have waited years to find a decent job -- one young guy I talked to had worked as a security guard for 12 hours a day outdoors in the sun for less than $75 a month. Another worked as a teacher for $30 a month until her daughter got sick and she had to quit.

I am convinced that social outsourcing is going to take off as a sector. There are millions of people just like the ones I met in poor regions of the world, ready and waiting for a job.

Giving Work - Europe, Haiti, and Beyond

Leila Chirayath Janah — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:00:00 -0500

The last seven days have been the most exhausting of my life – something like 8 countries in as many days. I started last week in Europe with sales meetings in Amsterdam and then caught a 6am train to France that ended, a flight, two cab rides, and a train later, in Newark, NJ to meet a customer. Ten hours and one Chinatown Bus after that, I arrived in Boston to pick up XO laptops from the MIT Media Lab donated by One Laptop Per Child and a stack of netbooks and wireless cards to test an Internet setup for our Samasource project in Mirebalais.

Thus equipped, I set off for Santo Domingo. There, I was to meet a pilot named Dr. Bob to fly me across the border to Port-au-Prince. This seemed a far better plan than the earlier one, which had involved shipping the netbooks to the Dominican Republic to be escorted into Haiti by the Salesian Sisters. (I am told the Santo Domingo customs officials are sympathetic to nuns.) Alas, Dr. Bob’s plane was full. I ended up spending the night on the Malecon in Santo Domingo, Skyping with the Mission 4636 team in Haiti, San Francisco, DC, and Boston. The next day, I took a small Tortug’Air plane to Haiti, and managed to drain my Blackberry battery on the tarmac. I was not prepared for Haiti.

Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince had giant holes in the walls. Outside, the impact of the earthquake was mind-blowing.

At least 200,000 people perished in the earthquake, and the city remains in ruin. Smoke and dust covered everything. Hundreds of office buildings and centers of commerce had collapsed entirely, including the Haitian White House, which went from looking like this before the quake:

to this:

But despite the devastation, people in Port-au-Prince seemed excited to get back to their lives. I saw numerous scenes like this one – shopkeepers putting things back in order,

Children playing in makeshift camps, and hundreds of people lined up to get their cell phones working again.

My mission in Haiti was to establish a digital work center in Mirebalais, a small town an hour from Port-au-Prince, to create jobs for the thousands of people that have fled the capital to find work through a partnership between Samasource, 1,000 Jobs/Haiti (a local NGO) and Mission 4636, a collaboration among several organizations to translate emergency text messages into English to assist aid workers in rescue operations. I arrived in Mirebalais and got to work, first setting up the Internet connection,

and then running a training for 47 local youth and refugees from the earthquake.

They were extremely motivated – the training started on a Sunday at 6pm, after many of them had waited all day for us to show up, and ran late into the night. At one point, the power went out for several minutes and people pulled out their cell phones and used their screens to keep reading. Afterwards, several workers requested additional copies of our training manuals and asked when they could start full-time. I wish I had better words to explain the feeling I had in that room – these people had lost everything, but still had the will to work.

I am humbled.

"Keep Your Ads Off American Television!": How to Win Friends and Influence Haters

Leila Chirayath Janah — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:15:38 -0500

When our ad ran on Hulu in late November, we got a couple of emails from people that thought our work deprives Americans of opportunity. Some used very strong language:

from Joe ****** <joe***@verizon.net>

to info@samasource.org

date Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 7:00 PM

subject Your company

mailing list <info.samasource.org> Filter messages from this mailing list

hide details Nov 22

I am about sick and tired of hearing about all these companies like yours that take work that could help our country and take it away from us to give to other countries. The USA is falling apart because of egotistical, money hungry assholes that care more about finding ways to make more money no matter what it does to the rest of us! So as far as I'm concerned bring the work to us or keep your ads off of our AMERICAN television systems!

When you put your heart and soul into a job that pays nothing, takes up every ounce of your energy, and doesn't even give you equity, emails like this one really hurt. So, against the advice of my colleagues, I wrote back:

leila*****@gmail.com ✆
to Joe, info

show details Nov 22

Dear Joe,
We are a nonprofit helping the poorest people in the world, including low-income entrepreneurs in the US. If you'd like to engage in a constructive dialogue about how we could help more Americans, please let us know -- we'd be happy to.
Best wishes,
Leila

Admittedly, it's probably not the best use of a CEO's time to respond to angry internet TV watchers, but there was something about Joe's message that really got to me. Many people think that work generated by an American company must be done by Americans, or else we're somehow hurting our economy. I don't get it. Why should people assume that giving work is a zero-sum game?

Anyway, three days later, we received this:

Joe *******
to me

show details Nov 25

I live in Ohio which has one of, if not the highest unemployment rate in the country. I have been looking for work unsuccessfully for over a year. There is an old K-Mart building in my town that would be perfect to renovate into a building that would suit the needs of your company perfectly, which would in turn provide many jobs for my area. If there is anything you could do to get this going, it would be greatly appreciated! I appologize for my previous e-mail, but I hope you can understand the reasoning behind it.

Thanks
Joe ******

Now Joe is investigating ways to start a Samasource program in Ohio. I haven't heard from him in a while, but I think this is pretty cool.

You've Heard of Refugee All-Stars; How about Refugee E-Cards?

Leila Chirayath Janah — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:16:30 -0500

Breaking news! We just launched online cards recorded by women, youth, and refugees in Africa and rural South Asia. I think these are the first of their kind -- they're sort of like UNICEF cards, except the workers who make them benefit directly from the sale of each one.

Here's a card we custom-designed for George Strombopolous, who interviewed me on his TV show The Hour last week.

Digital goods like e-cards are an exciting new possibility for bringing more work to our beneficiaries. Here's why:

1. They're fun to make (we built a simple back-end that lets people create cards by uploading their own images, adding audio, and creating their own text), especially compared to business-to-business services like data entry.

2. We can sell cards to consumers, rather than businesses, which helps us spread our message more directly and capture the extra margin consumers are willing to pay for socially-labeled goods.

3. I think this is part of a broader trend towards "digital handicrafts" -- the next-generation of fair trade products that get around the hassles of delivery and fulfillment that plague many companies selling physical goods in this space.

Any other ideas for digital goods made by our workers?

A Parisian in Nairobi – Samasource’s first Fellow

Leila Chirayath Janah — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:54:06 -0500

When arriving in Nairobi, one can quickly feel stifled by people, noise, pollution, so the charm of the city is not obvious at first. This city is like a whirlwind that can be stunning. But after the first shockwave, one gets used to this environment and appreciates the kind of life Nairobi has to offer.

I have been working as a Samasource fellow for one month now; it has been an experience which can be described as a journey of discovery, adaptation, meeting and sharing. Discovering the lifestyle here, adapting to the time and skills, meeting welcoming partners and talented workers, sharing of ideas and skills.

My initial task as a Fellow was to populate a new online database for Samasource for their website. This site now has the profiles of potential employees which allows new and existing clients to get a better feel of the knowledge, expertise and circumstance/aspirations of people they work with. My task was to compile a profile for every worker who participated in a Samasource project. Once the profiles were reviewed and the photos available I uploaded them onto the Samasource website. They are available on: www.samasource.org/impact.

This is great way to literally “put a face to a name” and to connect the workers with employers. It allows one to forget about the distance and understand Samasource’s goals by linking workers to jobs.

In visiting all the Service Partners and people, I learned how Samasource has given not only a “hand-up” but in fact provided life changing opportunity to workers. One of the workers I met was single mother who could not provide for her two children. Samasource, working with the service provider, has helped her to become independent and take care of her livelihood.

I met all kinds of people during this project, most of them are young and educated, went to or are actually at university in various sectors such as Hotel Management, Information and Technology, International Business, etc. All workers seem really motivated, talented and open minded. The service partners in Nairobi always provided a warm welcomed and I had really interesting discussions with some workers about various subjects as life, work, and the impact of Samasource projects.

Daproim (daproim.com) one of Samasource partners, provided me with office space during this project as well as Internet access. Steve, the president of the company, is an enthusiastic young entrepreneur who wants every employee to be treated with respect. He is interested in various training projects aimed at distressed people. Daproim, like some other Samasource partners, offers part-time work to local university students and facilities for disabled workers. Daproim started in 2006 with four employees, today it has already around 10. The plan is to grow to 20 or 30 people in the next years.

Steve is supporting a Cisco training center a few kilometers away from Nairobi. There, young women, often single mothers, are trained to do data entry and transcription tasks. This training is subsidized by an NGO. These women really want to succeed, and you can see in their eyes their thirst for knowledge. Steve feeds their motivation, while acknowledging that he needs to connect these women with jobs. There is no doubt that future difficulties lay ahead. The notion of hard work is on everyone’s lips, as there are no other means to succeed and the only way for them to benefit from a better life. Thus people are totally ready to offer their best.

So as I get used to the hustle and bustle of the city and plan my visits to the different service partners I feel good about lending a hand. I have to say that in my month of working as a Fellow for Samasource and helping create the Profiles database I too have learned the value of hard work! In my next blog I will write more about a typical work day for me in Nairobi.

Jugaad

Leila Chirayath Janah — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:00:40 -0500

Things are picking up for us. After a year of slaving away, living on friends' futons, etc., Samasource has generated a quarter of a million dollars in work benefitting 550 people in seven countries. We just did our numbers for our end-of-year board meeting, and it's astonishing. Just over a year ago, our website was a Wordpress blog and we'd signed one contract for $30K.

I attribute any success we've had to scrappiness. For-profit startups tend to have this quality in abundance. Starting up in a garage and living on ramen is part of the founding story of the biggest tech companies in the world (read Founders at Work if you don't know what I mean).

A while ago I wrote a post on useful tools for social entrepreneurs, but I think that scrappiness is less about what tools you use and more about your mindset.

Last month at TEDIndia, one of the other fellows mentioned a Hindi word that captures this concept perfectly: Jugaad. Simply put, Jugaad means resourcefulness, or doing more with less, MacGyver-style.

जुगाड़

Jugaadists (apologies to Hindi speakers) make startups happen, and if you can retain them, they help keep more established businesses nimble and creative. Jugaad is a big part of our culture at Samasource.

Some of the 100 Things I'm Thankful For

Leila Chirayath Janah — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:35:00 -0500

Feeling grateful is one of the main ways to boost happiness, according to the experts. My fifth-grade teacher Miss Watanabe seemed to know this before anyone else: for extra credit, she had us turn in a list of the 100 things we're most thankful for.

It works like Prozac. Here are some of my favorites from this year's list:

1. The free Kindle app for iPhone

2. Ben Franklin's 13 Virtues

3. Amjad Ali Khan's "Ram Dhun" (one of the most beautiful songs ever played)

4. The 43 staff, interns, Fellows, board members and volunteers that have made Samasource my dream job

8. Bossacucanova

11. V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River.

16. The primitivo grape

21. The lard at 826 Valencia

22. Shah Jehan, for the best gardens in South Asia

24. Blitzen Trapper

27. The Methodist church in Gloster, Mississippi

29. Nikon D70

43. Mary Kingsley, one of my favorite Adventurettes

45. The Animal Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya

46. Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

49. GGM / Love in the Time of Cholera

50. Flipcam

52. The Bonaventure

57. Max Ernst

59. Henry Moore

63. Pacific Wilderness Diving Supercenter in San Pedro, CA

67. Dosas at Udupi Palace in Cerritos, CA

74. Fresh lime soda

78. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

86. Queen Idia @ The Met

87. Juana Molina

90. Paul Parach

99. El Metate

100. Epicurus

Book Review: Predictably Irrational

Leila Chirayath Janah — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:51:38 -0500

Finally, after 18 cities in 30 days (from Ixtapa to Coimbatore, and everywhere in between), I'm back to the daily grind. And this blog.

Here's a pearl if you haven't read it already: Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Ariely, a behavioral economist, enlightens readers about everything from absurd CEO compensation (they make 369x what workers make, up threefold from what it used to be a decade ago) to why we shouldn't trust teenagers to use condoms in the heat of the moment.

The parts most useful to social entrepreneurs are a couple of chapters in the middle, where Ariely describes how market norms (the kind that make you pay for stuff) differ from social norms (the kind that make you want to do stuff for free). It helped me understand how we were able to pull off our Gala last week with an all-volunteer staff, and how nonprofits can score great employees from the for-profit sector if we focus on our competitive advantage (doing good, even if it's for far less pay).

There's also great advice on how to build a good company (make people feel valued and appeal to social norms, not just market norms) and how to stop procrastinating. I'm still working on the latter.

Live from TEDIndia

Leila Chirayath Janah — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:15:11 -0500

Lakshmi Prathury and Chris Anderson kick things off with a moving reading of Tagore's Mind Without Fear.

Hans Rosling predicts (with the energy of a sportscaster at the top of his game) that average income in India and China will catch up with the US and UK on July 27, 2048!

Virtual sweatshops?

Leila Chirayath Janah — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:55:50 -0400

Just posted this as a response to a note on ReadWriteWeb that our partner CrowdFlower is exploiting children by embedding tasks within social games on sites like Facebook. A lot of the issues raised are similar to concerns we've heard earlier, so I'm posting my response:

---

I'm the Founder of Samasource, a nonprofit that uses CrowdFlower's technology to connect extremely marginalized people, including refugees in Africa, to digital work. We were accused of creating "virtual sweatshops" a few weeks ago, which made me think really deeply about our model and the ethics of sending this kind of work to marginalized people. (While our workers aren't children, they aren't able to do many other types of work due to their location or status as refugees, making them vulnerable to exploitation.)

So here are my thoughts. It's worth noting that our perspective on this is independent of financial incentive; owners of a nonprofit don't get equity, and 90% of the income from the work we perform goes directly to workers.

For something to be truly exploitive, it has to deny people choice. That can happen in two ways: either people are forced or coerced to do something, or they are incapable of making a choice because they're very young, very old, or mentally handicapped. The key thing about CrowdFlower's model is that it's based on choice, rather than coercion. Workers do tasks because they earn money and because the tasks only take a few minutes. It's also built to optimize worker performance and weed out people who do a bad job. It's hard to get accurate results from people who are coerced into doing work.

From our perspective, this kind of "microwork" is fantastic for our beneficiaries who face grim alternatives for earning a living, like toiling under the sun on a field or in a quarry (those aren't made up -- many of our workers have done those things before to get by.)

It's also nice for our beneficiaries that these tasks can be done virtually anywhere, at any time. CrowdFlower frees workers from 9-5 monotony by making it easy for them to log in and work when they want to. With Gambit, they're placing these tasks in all sorts of unlikely places that make them become less burdensome and more fun to do. Social games are one example of that. The iPhone app we launched with CrowdFlower (called Give Work) is another.

The fact that children might be doing tasks as part of a game doesn't bother me in the least. If kids are savvy enough to hold their own in an online game, they're certainly capable of making choices about how they wish to spend their time.

Child labor laws are designed to protect children from being exploited. In the countries where we work, children are made to skip school and weave rugs, work in brothels, or plow fields. It seems a little silly to put completing a few tasks as part of an online game experience in that category.

Why Microfinance Won't End Poverty

Leila Chirayath Janah — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:45:59 -0400

This morning at Opportunity Collaboration, Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui (Board Chairman of the highly profitable microfinance institution Compartamos Banco, in Mexico), made a bold statement:

Microfinance doesn't help the poorest of the poor. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily contribute to economic development.

With interest rates of 73 percent (compared to the Mexican average of 100 percent), investment returns of 40 percent, and 1.5 million borrowers, Compartamos is a highly scalable commercial model for microfinance. But it might not turn out to be a highly scalable model for ending poverty, as so many have claimed, because the people who receive microloans are not the poorest of the poor.

Arregui noted that the Poverty Action Lab at MIT has just started a 3-year randomized, controlled trial of the impact of loans from Compartamos on three communities in Mexico, so we might have better answers soon.

an iPhone app that gives work

Leila Chirayath Janah — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:53:44 -0400

After many sleepless nights, we're launching Give Work today with our partner CrowdFlower (get it here).

Give Work is an iPhone app that lets you earn money for refugees in Dadaab, Kenya in your spare time. Here's how it works:

1. Download the app

2. Do a task, such categorizing an image, judging a sentence, or something else that takes a minute or two

3. A refugee that has been trained does the same task

4. Once the task has been completed, a refugee gets paid for the work you both collaborated on.

Pretty nifty! Help us out by downloading the app and telling us what you think.

Social Enterprising on the Go

Leila Chirayath Janah — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:25:00 -0400

Turns out "as much as possible" means once in 2 weeks, but here are some highlights:

Meeting Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame, at the African Social Enterprise Forum. Craig said he hates doing anything but customer service, answers 150K emails a month, and views Craigslist as a public good. Despite what Wired wrote last month, I heart Craig.

Managing to miss four African presidents speak at the US-Africa business summit, but scoring a free ragball at the soccer demo (World Cup 2010!)

Talking with Dean Kamen, rockstar Segway inventor, about his low-cost power solution that runs entirely on cow dung and costs $2K

Running into a big brown bear in the Eastern Sierras, where I'm (!) snowed in with a bunch of social entrepreneurs at the Rainer Arnhold Fellows retreat.

Also I'm reading 4 really good books right now, which are on the to-do list to write up for readers of Samasourcing...

NYC, DC, BOS, Reno in 1.5 weeks

Leila Chirayath Janah — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:48:05 -0400

All coach class + couches and putting my much-abused MacBook through the ringer.

I'll try to blog as much as possible with funny anecdotes from the following:

September 26: African Social Enterprise Forum - props for using Weebly [NY]

September 29-Oct 1: Corporate Council on Africa US-Africa Business Summit [DC]

Oct 1-3: MIT Legatum Center Annual Conference [Boston]

Oct 3-10: Rainer Arnhold Fellows [Somewhere outside Reno]

In the meantime, follow me or Samasource on Twitter for updates!

What is “reasonably priced” for a not for profit?

Leila Chirayath Janah — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:38:08 -0400

Great post on the Sama blog from our own Jess McCarter on software pricing for nonprofits. When the marginal cost of a producing something is 0 or near 0 (as in the case of software, pills, and information), differential pricing is the only ethical option. Right?

Here's an excerpt from the post (full story here):

A hard working not for profit (NFP) has something in common with a successful for profit company – they both aggressively look at every item of the budget to make sure they stay in the black. Of course, after that things diverge. Regular companies invest in tools to increase the bottom line and NFPs seeks to save as much of their capital as possible so they have enough left for the expenses that directly impact the community they are trying to serve.

One of the things I do to attack the bottom line is to politely ask the companies whose software products we use if they would be willing to donate a license to, or at least offer a discount on a license to Samasource. Some of these products are really expensive and some of them are really reasonably priced. But what does “reasonably priced” mean to a NFP? You see we think about things slightly differently. For me $20 is a wire transfer of payment to Cameroon or a sliver of a training program for 10 new potential Samasource workers trying to make a dignified digital living.

Of course, that’s what I care about. Other companies have different priorities. I get it. It’s just that when you ask everyone whose products you use you get a wide variety of responses. Some people are really cool, like Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com). They have a file syncing program that works through a web app and desktop clients for Windows and Mac. The free version is 2 GB and that was fine till we started making a video ad for Hulu (also donated, thanks Hulu.com!). I wrote, they got right back to me and bumped us to 10 GB of shared storage.

Some of the other tools we use we were able to purchase at a large discount thanks to Techsoup. Their NFP version of Adobe Creative Suite was something we could justify as it is a great tool for illustrating the stories of our service partners on the website and in print materials. Also it was a LARGE discount on a very expensive piece of software. Thanks Techsoup and Adobe! It would have been better if it was free. Did I mention we don’t use this tool to make a profit but rather to help people who live in extreme poverty work their way to a livelihood?

Of course some people say no. That’s cool, they have other things going on, maybe they don’t care about our mission or don’t even have a charitable giving program. Not every for profit business has the time, the budget, the desire or the motivation to donate. More power to them and I hope they rock their bottom line.

And then there are just jerks. A great example is 37 Signals. They make money building amazing tools for other people to make money with – project management, CRM, and other software products largely used by businesses. And what did they say when I asked if they had a donation or discount program?

“We… believe everyone is entitled to the best price we can offer, from the small businessperson who’s barely squeaking by to the non-profit to the big corporation. That’s why the published prices are the only prices we offer.”

Wow. I respect a good honest no, but to suggest that the reason they don’t offer a NFP discount is that they sell Basecamp, et al for best price they can offer to anyone, anywhere and anytime? I have no knowledge of their marginal costs or balance sheets, I am just going out on a limb to suggest that they just don’t want to donate. I would even respect a “No, and you are a big bozo for even asking.” I get that sometimes. Maybe I am a bozo. I thought it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Our amazing mentors have told us again and again you have to ask. And we will continue to do so. Feel free to say no. But I’d appreciate it if you said yes.