The $500,000 grant will allow Samasource to expand its operations in East Africa, connecting more women and youth to digital work.  The Innovation Jury–composed of Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, and Melanne Verveer, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues–found that Samasource’s proposal “truly holds the promise of transforming the lives of women and girls.”

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, the Innovation Award seeks to find and scale up the most pioneering approaches to the political, economic and social empowerment of women and girls around the world. The award was first launched in 2010 by President Barack Obama and Secretary Clinton in conjunction with the Office of Global Women’s Issues–both founded on the premise that the most pressing challenges of our time cannot be solved without the full participation of women at all levels of society.

The awards ceremony will be held March 9th in Washington, DC.

San Francisco nonprofit Samasource just got a seal of approval for its efforts from tech giant Google. Google.org is making a $1.5 million grant to Samasource, an innovative San Francisco tech company that serves as a link between large U.S. technology companies and poor people in the developing world looking for work.  These large tech companies outsource small piecework that Samasource calls ‘microwork’ to poor people across the developed world.

“Samasource stood out to us as an organization with strong leadership, demonstrated impact, and an ability to scale,” Jacquelline Fuller, director of Charitable Giving at Google.org, said via email.

“We’re thrilled to have Google’s support in realizing our vision to bring dignity and work to those who need it most,” says Samasource founder and CEO Leila Janah.  Samasource has now raised a total of $5 million from investors including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundations and the eBay foundation.

I wrote about Samasource for Forbes magazine here in June.  Janah studied development issues, worked for the World Bank, and became convinced that foreign aid wasn’t going to solve the biggest problem for poor people. What so many of the poor really want, Janah told me, is a job that pays decently. She created Samasource as a way to deliver work to people who want it.

Samasource has become a link between companies like LinkedIn, Intuit and Google –which need simple computer-based tasks completed –and poor people in countries like Kenya, India, Pakistan and Haiti. It partners with organizations in cities like Nairobi and in rural areas as well, and gives people an opportunity to start working on easy tasks—verifying information on a website– and move on toward more complicated things like searching for ingredients in shampoos and lotions (for client GoodGuide).

So far Samasource has found work for 2,000 people. It’s a small step, but it’s a meaningful  way to change people’s lives. And it’s not a hand out.

Google.org announced a total of $40 million in grants Wednesday –this is just one of them. Read more about the others in this blog post. For 2011, Google.org’s charitable giving will total $115 million.

View the full article and comments HERE

$1.25 Million grant from Google.org to accelerate the scaling of the groundbreaking social enterprise’s technology, sales and global operations; brings total funding to $5 Million

SAN FRANCISCO – DECEMBER 14, 2011 - Samasource, the leading provider of distributed data management and content services, today announced a major milestone in its mission to deliver high quality microwork to large enterprises. With a $1.25 million dollar grant announced today by Google.org, Samasource has now raised a total of $5 million from social investors including the eBay, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

This funding milestone enables the groundbreaking social enterprise to scale its innovative model that blends a private, managed workforce with best-in-class technology. Treating large grants like venture capital, Samasource will invest this latest round of funding in its proprietary web platform, the SamaHub, and in sales, marketing and core business operations. Since 2008, Samasource has delivered high-quality services that deliver cost savings and improved data quality to enterprise customers such as Google, Intuit and LinkedIn.

Comments on the News:

“Samasource is an entirely new type of company,” said Leila Janah, founder and CEO. “Our innovative non-profit model serves enterprise customers and creates sustainable livelihoods for 2,000 marginalized people through work, rather than handouts. We’re thrilled to have Google’s support in realizing our vision to bring dignity and work to those who need it most.”

“We have been very happy working with Samasource over the last two years. Their team has been incredibly responsive to our needs and delivered a cost effective service that matches GoodGuide’s mission and values by providing dignified work to women and youth living in poverty,” said Dara O’Rourke, Co-Founder and CSO at GoodGuide.

Best-in-Class Technology and Managed Workers: The Model for Delivering New Efficiencies to Enterprises

Founded in 2008, Samasource provides high quality content and data management services to enterprise clients using best-in-class technology and a managed workforce in the developing world. Samasource does this by connecting women and youth in the poorest parts of the world to microwork – small tasks that can be done online using inexpensive computers and a cloud-based platform, the SamaHub. Microwork is embedded in the value chains of most large corporations, and involves tasks that require human judgement such as image tagging, data mining and content validation. Through Samasource, enterprises are able to build and manage proprietary databases, feed large quantities of training data to machine learning algorithms, and drive traffic to their websites and applications.

The success of its model is due to two distinguishing factors:

• The SamaHub platform – The custom Ruby application allows Samasource to break down large projects into efficient tasks, which are then distributed to workers around the world. The platform provides real-time insight into worker performance and behavior, with flexible QA workflows and game mechanics to incentivize worker performance.
• Managed Workforce – Unlike crowdsourcing services, Samasource manages a full-time workforce, providing local management, live and online training and career progression. Experienced workers comprehend projects deeply and can be trusted with proprietary or secure information.

Additional Resources

• Founder and CEO Leila Janah speaking at TEDx Silicon Valley and at TEDxBrussels.

About Samasource

Samasource is an award-winning social enterprise that brings content and data services work to the developing world. Samasource’s workers provide large technology companies such as Google, Intuit and LinkedIn with training data for machine learning, SEO and image tags, and high-quality content. Its proprietary work platform supports crowdsourcing mechanics with the added flexibility of human quality assurance (QA) workflows. Quality is driven by a dedicated, trained and closely managed workforce, who earn living wages at rates U.S. businesses can afford. Through its global web platform and San Francisco-based operations team, Samasource monitors work in real time and provides clients with deep analytics and excellent results.

Samasource and its leadership have won multiple awards for its groundbreaking model, including a 2010 World Technology Award. Founder and CEO Leila Janah was recognized as Entrepreneur of the Year by the Social Enterprise Alliance, one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, and a Woman to Watch by Marie Claire Magazine. Samasource is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded through institutional grants and private donations, and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Learn more at www.samasource.org, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

On Friday, I wrote about two social enterprises ― Samasource and Digital Divide Data ― that extend computer-based employment to people with modest educations in developing countries. The strategy of harnessing the Internet to bring low-cost data management jobs to remote and impoverished communities has been called “impact sourcing.” Some estimate that the market for these services, $4.5 billion today, could rise to $20 billion by 2015, providing jobs to 780,000 people (pdf, p.14).

A number of readers thought the idea had great potential to alleviate poverty in the developing world. David Griesing, from Philadelphia, (29) saw it as a way to allow more people to “work with dignity” while improving their productive capacity. Patrick McNamara, from the Boston Area, Mass. (46), noted that it could be a way to increase global security, as well ― since “poverty and income inequalities … can lead to violence [and] have a negative impact on our economy and our own ‘homeland security.’” Tim Bal, from Belle Mead, N.J. (1), described impact sourcing as “a great innovation” that “would raise millions of the world’s poor out of poverty.” But he noted that it presents a problem: “It reduces the job demand in developed countries like the United States.”

Most readers had the same concern. And some took me to task for supporting an idea that they felt gave corporations a green light to exploit poor people in the developing world. Tombo, from New York State (34), wrote that impact sourcing was another “attempt to put lipstick on the globalization pig” and Luanne DE, from Taos, N.M. (40) commented that “ethical outsourcing” was, itself, an “oxymoron.”

At a time when so many Americans are in distress because they can’t find work, it may seem that impact outsourcing is the wrong idea to champion. More than 70 percent of Americans believe that outsourcingharms the U.S. economy. Outsourcing is usually characterized as “moving jobs overseas” as if it’s necessarily a one-for-one tradeoff. But it’s not that simple. Many of the jobs that are handled through impact sourcing could not be justified on economic terms if they had to be handled in the United States. These are labor-intensive tasks that companies, governments, nonprofits or individuals would like to do ― but will only do if the costs are not prohibitive. Accurately digitizing large swaths of information falls into this category.

“We’re focusing on the lowest rung of outsourcing work that even the big Indian companies don’t want any more because it’s priced too low for them,” explained Leila Janah, the founder of Samasource, a nonprofit organization that currently channels “microwork” ― small tasks like entering, cleaning or verifying data ― to 1,600 people in Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda and South Africa. “At higher prices, it simply wouldn’t make sense for many businesses to offer most of this work,” she said, because they wouldn’t be able to make a profit on the output. Now that such microwork can be distributed and managed affordably around the world, it’s possible to create jobs that would otherwise have been handled poorly by machines or not handled at all.

“To our knowledge, none of the assignments we’ve taken were for work previously done in the U.S.,” explained Jeremy Hockenstein, the founder of Digital Divide Data, which employs 900 people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya. He offered an example. “The Harvard Crimson would never have paid $5 million to digitize its archives — but they could afford to pay a few hundred thousand dollars to do it.”

Although Samasource highlights the marquee companies it has worked with, most of the requests for its services actually come from small businesses, start-ups, nonprofits and educational institutions. “For resource-strapped organizations like these, outsourcing labor is the only option,” adds Janah. “They cannot afford to innovate with American labor, both because of the high costs, and because it’s extremely complicated to hire someone in America.”

One of the mistakes I made in the article was mentioning the amounts that Samasource’s workers earn — at least $5 a day, and often more — without putting the figure in perspective. Adam, from Philadelphia (17) described this as “paying people peanuts in Third World countries to sell to people in [the] First World.” And Shotsie, from Albuquerque, (2), asked “At $5 a day, how are these people going to boost their local economy enough to actually buy local or imported products?”

The amounts have to be considered in the context of people’s lives. Rates of malnutrition and child mortality are very high among Samasource’s target group, and life expectancy is low. “The people we help earn less than what $3 a day would buy you in the United States (in 2005 dollars), which is pretty shocking,” explains Janah. “Our initial target population is living at a level that is hard for most Americans to fathom.” Over all, Samasource’s workers double their previous incomes. Samasource ensures that its workers are paid above guidelines set by the Fair Wage Guide, which stipulates wage levels that allow workers to support themselves and contribute to their local economies.

According to the World Bank, in 2010 per capita income was $780 per year in Kenya and $760 per year in Cambodia. Even the minimum salary of $5 a day represents more than a 65 percent increase over these averages (assuming five days of work per week for the full year). But many workers earn more. At Adept Technologies, one of Samasource’s partners in Kenya, the average monthly earning for a Samasource worker is about $170, according to Diana Gitiba, Adept’s co-founder. This figure represents an annualized income of more than $2,000 a year, or roughly 250 percent of Kenya’s per-capital income. Graduates of Digital Divide Data’s work-study program typically earn 400 percent the national income in their countries, notes Hockenstein.

Even so, nobody is getting rich. “The wages these jobs provide are not enough to get workers into the middle class,” explained Hockenstein. “But they are enough to provide for food, shelter and transportation.” And they often allow people to pay for schooling for themselves and family members. This is far from peanuts.

The readers who complained about outsourcing seem to hold the view that outsourcing of any form should be discouraged. Again, this response is understandable given the current unemployment crisis. But it’s not just Americans who need jobs; people around the world are suffering in poverty. And an earnings increase that would be barely significant in the U.S. context ― say, $3 a day ― can, in a country like India or Kenya, mean the difference between families eating well, having decent clothing, and being able to send their children, especially daughters, to school.

It’s hard to argue against making these opportunities available — particularly through social enterprises that are mission-driven and offer people work that is a stepping stone to a better life. At the same time, it’s necessary to do more to address the opportunity gap in this country ― including through “domestic outsourcing.” Samasource plans to launch a site in the United States within a year. “We chose to start internationally to demonstrate that the model would work even in very poor regions where there is much less infrastructure than the U.S.,” explained Janah.

As the author Robert Wright has argued, we no longer live in a zero-sum world, where one person’s, or one country’s gain, must be another’s loss. It’s possible, and indeed necessary, to construct win-win scenarios. The success of a young person in Kenya, Cambodia or India can improve the world we all live in. Diana Gitiba, the co-founder of Adept Technologies in Kenya, put it this way: “Which software do we use? We use American software. What hardware do we use? We use American hardware. We use Dell computers in the office. The more work we get in Kenya, the more we can trade with other countries, and the more everybody can have what they need. At the moment, I’m just happy that the 50 people we work with have a sure meal at their table tonight for dinner. And the more we do that for more people it will be a happier world to live in.”

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More than 60 percent of the world’s gross domestic product comes from global trade. This is double what it was in the 1980s. Most economists agree that the astonishing increase in trade over the past quarter century has boosted economic growth and job creation, and, in many countries, led to a decline in absolute poverty. But while the economic superhighway has spread around the globe, in many parts of the world there are still not enough on-ramps.

Globalization has allowed 1,200 people to become billionaires, but workers in the “informal economy” in developing countries ― more than 60 percent of all workers ― have not experienced improvements in living standards as a result of global trade. People want to participate in the global economy; they just can’t gain access.

One new approach for building on-ramps has been coined “impact sourcing.” The idea is to make it attractive for companies to outsource business processes to people in the developing world who come from impoverished or remote communities, who may have only a high school education, and who would otherwise have minimal opportunities to improve their lives.

Outsourcing isn’t new, just as banking wasn’t new when microfinance came along. And just as microfinance demonstrated that poor people are trustworthy borrowers, impact sourcing is demonstrating that people from villages and urban slums are reliable knowledge workers.

The market for “business process outsourcing” is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, with the market for impact sourcing estimated at $4.5 billion (pdf, p.11). Most of the world’s outsourced work is handled by college graduates in cities in India, China and the Philippines. One reason impact sourcing has taken off is that outsourcing costs have risen sharply, so companies are looking to engage less-educated and more remote workers (because they are less expensive to hire).

The worry is that this shift will lead to a race to the bottom and culminate in “digital sweatshops.” This is a legitimate concern. Which is why I’m highlighting two social enterprises that are approaching the outsourcing opportunity in creative ways. (Social enterprises seek to be profitable, but prioritize social impact.) Both have given deep consideration to the question: How do we help people from disadvantaged backgrounds gain a foothold in the global economy?

One of them is Digital Divide Data, a pioneering organization that employs 900 people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya and was foundedway back in 2001. The other is Samasource, a fast-growing enterprise that was established in 2008 and has already received recognition for its ability to manage “microwork” in a kind of virtual assembly line that spans 1,600 workers across Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda and South Africa ― some of them living in refugee camps.

Both Digital Divide Data (DDD) and Samasource were founded by former management consultants whose experiences in the developing world led them to redeploy their skills to alleviate poverty. DDD’s co-founder Jeremy Hockenstein was moved to launch his enterprise after visiting Phnom Penh where he met young Cambodians in Internet cafes eager to learn English because they “were so excited by the promise of globalization.” The reality was that good job opportunities were scarce.

As a youth, Leila Janah, the founder of Samasource, spent six months teaching English at a school for the blind in Ghana. “The kids were so savvy and motivated but they had no opportunity and there was nothing they could do about it,” she recalled. “They just happened to be born in the wrong place. And I thought: ‘What would it take to make a place like Ghana less poor?’” Years later, as a consultant, she did work for a large outsourcing company in India ― and she saw no reason why the people driving rickshaws couldn’t be earning more money working with computers.

Samasource, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has demonstrated the ability to generate business from companies like Facebook, Google, Intuit and LinkedIn, and distribute it across independently-owned outsourcing firms. (It currently has 16 partners.)

In exchange, Samasource requires that partners adhere to an ethical code of conduct. They must reinvest at least 40 percent of revenues in training, salaries, and community programs. They must hire workers who were earning less than $3 a day. (Once employed, they generally earn $5 a day, and often more.) To date, the company has distributed $1.2 million in salaries. Seventy percent of its workers are the primary breadwinners in their households and support at least two other people.

“Most of them are with us to get a foothold,” explains Diana Gitiba, the co-founder of one of Samasource’s delivery centers, Adept Technologies, in Nairobi, Kenya, which currently employs 50 people who work on Samasource contracts. “When people are looking for work, they are always asked, ‘Do you have experience?’ Of course they don’t have experience! They just finished school.”

The official unemployment rate in Kenya is 40 percent ― and about 65 percent of the labor force is made up of young people. “When you think about the energy that’s out there on the loose, it’s kind of scary,” she said. “We have to make sure our youth have opportunities to do positive work.” Her goal is to be employing 1000 people by 2015.

There is no shortage of work to be done. The world runs on data and each day it needs to be updated. Shopping companies need to revise business locations; voice transcriptions need to be corrected; videos need to be captioned; photos need to be tagged; government archives need to be entered into databases; receipts and mortgage applications need to be scanned and verified. Much of it demands human judgment. And much of it can be handled anywhere there is an Internet connection. But there are barriers. “Many people don’t think that the poor in the developing world can do work on a computer,” explained Janah. “They won’t say it explicitly. But they think it’s too sophisticated.”

Samasource provides delivery centers with training assistance. It has also developed technology to break down data jobs into simple tasks ― “microwork”—that can be distributed in pieces around the world, reassembled, and re-checked for accuracy.

For Janah, microwork is a stepping stone to higher education and better careers. Many Samasource workers are paying their way through school. Others have proved themselves through work. Janah recalled a 21-year-old worker from Nairobi who is deaf. “He had never held a formal job because he has a disability,” she said. “He was hired because we require hiring people from disadvantaged backgrounds. He was their best data entry guy for nine months then he got a job at Barclays.”

Data workers develop skills in English, computers, and a variety of project-specific tasks. They also gain experience in professional environments. “A lot of people have never reported to an office on time or worn formal clothes to work,” explains Janah. “Just the exposure to this world is valuable.”

Digital Divide Data takes a more directed approach. It looks for high school students who would “otherwise not have gone on to college,” explains Hockenstein, and offers them a four year work study program, during which they spend six hours a day working and the rest of the time pursuing higher education.

DDD has graduated about 400 people who earn four times the average income in their countries. Because DDD spends more time with employees, it can provide them with deeper skills training. This allows them to take on more complex work, like electronic publishing. DDD also provides career counseling services. (It translated the book “What Color is Your Parachute? For Teens” ― a young person’s version of one of the world’s most popular job-hunting guides ― into Khmer and Laotian.)

“The difference we see between when people walk in and when they walk out after four years is so powerful,” explains Hockenstein. “They feel that they can control their future.”

DDD and Samasource offer different approaches for how the global economy can be made more inclusive. DDD’s model goes deeper with each employee, but requires more direct investment. Samasource influences the hiring and management practices of many companies and can, therefore, expand more rapidly, but it does not shepherd each worker as methodically. Both combine business and philanthropic resources to maximize their social impact and ensure financial sustainability.

When people talk about the “bottom of the pyramid,” they are usually thinking of the poor as potential consumers. Impact sourcing shifts the perspective. “We think the way out of poverty is to view the poor as producers,” says Janah. “And the Internet is probably the most efficient tool we have for tapping this capacity. Because you don’t need roads. You don’t need customs officials who are friendly. You don’t need to manage shipping and delivery schedules. You don’t have to worry about tariffs. The production happens instantaneously and the good ― the knowledge output ― gets shipped instantaneously. This is the first time in human history we can do that.”

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.

View the full article, comments, and more HERE

It’s true: women and girls are hot. Double-Xers are finally making it to the top of the development agenda following the publication of Sheryl WuDunn and Nick Kristof’s book Half the Sky (now a global movement), Sheryl Sandberg’s iconic TED talk on women at work, and the genius of The Girl Effect animated PSAs.

But most of the focus is on education for the “girl-child” (can’t we just call them girls?) and not on the underlying problem: women have little perceived economic value in most parts of the world.

That’s why they are selectively aborted — so much so that 120 men are born for every 100 women in China — and denied proper nutrition and health care in poor families across South Asia. Women in India are fifty percent more likely than boys to perish before they reach the age of five. Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, summed up these combined horrors in a famous piece in 1990 titled simply “More than 100 Million Women are Missing.”

The women that remain have it rough: collectively, we produce a whopping 66% of the world’s economic output (primarily in basic agriculture and manufacturing), according to UNIFEM, the UN agency that monitors gender-based issues, and yet own fewer than 10% of the assets and income.

So women do work, and working women support families and young children, but their jobs pay very little and leave them vulnerable to exploitation and economic shocks.

This is one of the great tragedies of our time. We know what happens when a woman earns money. She is far more likely than a man to spend her earnings on the health and education of her children, and to invest in improving her family’s standard of living. And yet we have no large-scale schemes to employ women en masse. Microfinance, we have learned, has its limits. Not every woman is an entrepreneur, and not every loan can get her out of poverty.

We are in dire need of additional avenues to the full-scale participation of women in the global workforce.

That’s why I founded Samasource three years ago. I’d worked as an international development consultant at the World Bank and for various NGOs, and felt like the traditional approaches — teaching women to weave baskets, showing them how to apply fertilizer to improve crop yields, granting them small loans to start micro businesses — were a step in the right direction, but far from enough. Most critically, I felt that we were losing out on a huge opportunity to enfranchise women by using the Internet to tap their brainpower.

Samasource now connects over 1,600 women and youth who make less than $3 a day to what they need most: work. We partner with large Internet and data companies to break down large projects into what we call microwork: simple tasks like finding a phone number or labeling an image that require human intelligence and a bit of training. This model provides real skills to workers — women in our centers in East Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean learn how to use computers and the Internet, how to represent themselves professionally online, and how to report to work in a formal environment.

One of our workers in a village in rural India wrote to us last year and said, “Because of Samasource, I now see the world.” She was referring, of course, to the Internet, that world of collective human knowledge to which 5 billion people in poor countries still lack access. In one of our work centers, an office dedicated to women in a Muslim district of Calcutta, a 19-year-old named Neha told me she was never allowed to ride a bicycle — her family feared she’d stray too far from home. She had never held a job before. Now, six months after she started doing Samasource work, Neha dreams of becoming a pilot. Neha’s boss told us that most of the women who come to work have never had a career aspiration before, because they’ve internalized the message that they’re worthless in the formal economic sector. It’s hard for us to fathom what it means for a woman like Neha to get paid to use her brain.

This model can scale. We’ve put 1,600 of the world’s poor, capable and motivated people like Neha, on projects for companies like LinkedIn and Google. In three short years, Samasource has turned this process into a payout of more than $1.2 million US dollars to women and young people living in slums, villages, refugee camps, and other places deprived of formal work opportunities. Back when we started, people laughed me out of conference rooms when I told them about my idea. Now, they forward our newsletters to their friends and help us gain access to clients.

Those one million dollars go farther than one person’s paycheck. The income creates a multiplier effect — by training marginalized women in digital work, Samasource not only provides direct employment, but also increases household spending on health and education, increases a woman’s wages substantially over her lifetime, and decreases the likelihood that she will be forced to leave her community, and the social protections it offers, to find work.

Jacqueline, another one of our women workers, joined a Samasource Delivery Center in Nairobi, Kenya eight months ago. She’d never had a formal job before, and made ends meet working in a local food stall. She had to drop out of her engineering degree program because she couldn’t afford the tuition. Now, thanks to Samasource, Jacqueline digitizes books for a client halfway around the world (Bookshare.org, the largest repository of reading materials for blind readers in the world). “I like assisting disabled people,” Jacqueline told us in her tin-roofed rented room on the outskirts of Nairobi. She finds the work inspiring. “Because if I remember I am doing this job for somebody somewhere who cannot see, I feel that I have that heart of doing it perfectly.”

Jacqueline now pays her own rent, her mother’s rent and her sister’s school fees. She’s saving to resume her engineering degree next year. Jacqueline, an unmarried woman in her twenties, is no longer considered a burden to her family (the tragic fate of so many young African and Asian women). She is the primary breadwinner.

Jacqueline’s story is one of many that we have heard from over 600 women who’ve worked    for Samasource. To celebrate our success and raise funds to recruit more women around the world, we’re holding our 3rd Annual Give Work Gala focused on Work for Women on Friday, November 4th. Sheryl WuDunn, the Half the Sky author I cited earlier, will join the Onion’s Director of Digital Baratunde Thurston in hosting the event; Les Nubians will perform live.

Funds raised at this year’s Gala will go directly to training and hiring more women at Samasource Delivery Centers around the world. It costs $500 to train     one woman and make her employable for life; we hope to raise enough money to do this          for 1,000 women in Kenya and India within the next year.

Despite our best efforts, we know that we are a long way away from training and employing  the billions of capable yet poor women who are hungry for an opportunity to use their brains and skills to earn a living. But for the moment, we will celebrate one small victory in this  larger fight: the efforts of workers like Jacqueline whose talents have found a place to thrive.

We’ve now impacted over 6,000 people in 9 countries with income from the world’s leading tech companies through a model that’s sustainable and efficient — all our worker payments come directly from our client contracts. Instead of sending donations to the field, fundraising dollars go to start-up expenses, like scaling our technology infrastructure. Since January, monthly client revenues have doubled with long-term contracts with Fortune 100 clients.

In a few years, through scaling our business model, Samasource will operate entirely on earned income. In the meantime, hitting the “Million Dollar Milestone” was a great acknowledgement of the hard work of SamaTeams around the world. The team shared mimosas with jugaad prosecco and took turns pressing “send” on the worker payment interface. As the monthly payments went out, Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” played in the background.