Name: Here’s How Samasource Is Connecting People in Slums to High-Paying Jobs
Uploaded: 2016-12-02
Duration: 4 min 26 s
Description: CEO Leila Janah explains

[ MUSIC ] Can't remember who it was all ready, this morning, who mentioned that we need to focus not just about talking but about doing. Lila Jonna is a doer. And I'm gonna ask her to start by telling you about what her organization does. And where we're gonna come around to our very Quick sprint of a conversation, Leila, is how the people who represent the businesses in the room can do similar things. Sure, so the organization I started, Samasource, is a profitable nonprofit. So we are such an anomaly in Silicon Valley I can't even tell you. [ LAUGH ] We're one of the few intentional nonprofits in the Bay Area. And we started eight years ago to connect low income people to work through the internet. So I had read Tom Freedman's book, The World is Flat. I had actually worked as a management consultant for the outsourcing industry in India. And I thought, what if we could take this enormous industry, global outsourcing, and transform it so it could benefit people at the very bottom of the pyramid. What Mohammad Emis did for micro finance I thought we could do for For outsourcing and create this new model of what we call micro work. So we started eight years breaking these big data projects down into small units of work. For example, we do image tagging for several of the biggest machine learning algorithms now in Silicon Valley. We have about 1100 workers working full time during this micro work From low income regions around the world. Break that down and go into detail briefly on those if you would. Who are the client? And where are the workers and are they your employees are they somebody else's employees? Sure, so we started off doing data entry work eight years ago back before optical character recognition could do a lot of this in an automated way. Now we do things like image tagging and content services for firms like Microsoft, Glass Door, Trip Advisor, IBM. We're actually talking to a team right now about doing this. And so this a really new type of work. Training the machines to do what humans used to do is an entirely new field. And, as you mentioned earlier, Jenny, this idea of augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence Requires a lot of human input. So we're training people who would otherwise be completely disconnected from the digital economy. People who previously made less than $ 2 a day in this new type of work. And it's a model we now call impact sourcing. And So you mention Microsoft, they pay summer source. That's right, they summer source and we act as an agency that hires this workers directly. Now about 700 of the network are direct. We run a center in Kenya. That employs them directly. And we also work through partners. So other organisations that have computer centres in low- income countries. Typically non- profits that train people in these digital work skills. Take everyone, if you would, on a quick cook's tour of where you are. Because you're both in the developing world. And in the developed world, correct? That's right. We started a program in the US a couple of years ago. Backed by the Robinhood Foundation in New York. And we have this idea of training low income Americans to do these kind of data services work but also to benefit from the Gig economy. So we were the first non- profit to develop training tools for low income people to benefit from platforms like Uber and Lift and Task Rabbit and Care. com And we're about to announce a partnership with Care. com, something called the Care Institute we've been working on for several months to train low income people to be care givers on this new gig economy platform. It's kind of shocking to me that there are no federal or state funded job training programs in the United States that focus this rapidly growing sector of the gig economy. So your, if I understand you correctly, around The United States and around the world people give care on an informal basis. They do it, but they don't participate in any sort of platform and it's a reputational issue. That's right one of the main benefits of formalizing this informal work is giving people access to reputational equity. As white collar workers you get to benefit from a good job you did. You get a recommendation on LinkedIn. You get a whole employment history. If you're a day laborer you go and you do great work for the day the next day you're zeroed out again. You stand on the street corner, and you have no ability to actually Earn more money based on doing good work. So what we see in many of these platforms is that there's a very quick ramp for workers to make more money faster if they're doing good work. And actually benefit from the same reputational advantage that white collar workers have had for many decades. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]