Samasource
SERVICE
Samasource provides hands-on services to digital companies to enrich and label their large datasets. Being data-driven is key for a digital business to succeed today.
Samasource offers 4 services:
– Cleaning, verification and enrichment of companies’ data sets.
– Builing training data for natural language or computer vision algorithms.
– Creating or moderating content, and optimizing images
– Personalized online customer support
BUSINESS MODEL
Samasource is a non-profit, the entirety of revenues generated are reinvested to scale the impact.
Samasource uses a proprietary technology platform, the SamaHub, that breaks down large-scale digital projects from clients into smaller tasks for workers in developing countries or refugees to contribute. This is called microwork. These workers are trained in basic computer skills for a few weeks at delivery centers with which Samasource partners, and paid a local living wage for their labor.
Samasource and in-country partners collaborate on the recruiting process, which targets women, youth and refugees without formal work experience who are earning below a local living wage.
Samasource is a pioneer in the field of impact sourcing, the practice of hiring people from the bottom of the pyramid to complete digital work.
IMPACT
Place: Kenya, Uganda, India, and Haiti.
Scale: 9,081 people from 2008 to 2016 have been employed by Samasource, which use their earnings to support an average of 3 dependants.
Depth:
- By moving from $2 to $8 a day, Samasource workers vastly increase their spending on safer housing, nutritious food, education, and healthcare.
- They gain valuable work experience that helps them build a pathway out of poverty. 84% of workers continue to work or pursue education after they leave Samasource.
ORIGINS
Fresh out of Harvard in 2005, Leila Janah landed a job as a management consultant. One of her first assignments took her to Mumbai, where she traveled by auto-rickshaw to a sleek outsourcing center staffed by well-educated Indians from middle-class families. The ride took her past one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi, where cholera outbreaks are commonplace and children die of preventable diseases. Outsourcing might have been providing millions of jobs, but it wasn’t helping the country’s poorest. She began to think, “Couldn’t the people from the slums do some of this work?”
Janah, 32, turned that idea into Samasource —Sama is Sanskrit for “equal”—as an outsourcing company that hires people in Africa and Asia to perform digital tasks for companies like Google and LinkedIn.
In 2013, she launched a job-training program for low-income workers in the US. It helps people plug in to on-demand services like Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. Dubbed Samaschool, the effort is now rolling out across the US and, thanks to an online curriculum, globally.
(Wired)
WHAT’S NEXT?
- Samasource expanded in Europe (sales office in the Netherlands and Paris).
- Leila Janah started a second social enterprise – for profit this time – LXMI, selling luxury organic skincare products. She also released a book, « Give Work« , in September 2017 about how to incentivize everyone from entrepreneurs to big companies to give dignified, steady, fair-wage work to low-income people.
GET INVOLVED !
Give work too!
Interested to know more about Leila’s solution to end poverty? Read her book, where she shares poignant stories of people who have benefited from Samasource’s work, where and why it hasn’t worked.
Work for Samasource
Team up with some of the most talented people in Silicon Valley–and around the world (Kenya, France, Netherlands…)—to solve global poverty.