SAN FRANCISCO – FEBRUARY 13, 2012 -Samasource, the leader in ethical impact sourcing, announced today that it has received the 2012 Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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.”
At the end of January we officially “launched” the SamaLab in the Kilimani area of Nairobi. Last week we invited local delivery centers, partners and friends to join us and celebrate the occasion. The SamaLab is Samasource’s first innovation lab. We will use this environment to help test our technology, training, and microwork delivery processes. The goal is to identify the best and most efficient way we can deliver work to the field, from testing our own SamaHub to using/testing a variety of hardware and tools that change the way workers approach microwork. The space also serves as our East African regional headquarters.
Samasource Founder and CEO, Leila Janah, presents at the DePaul University Roundtable Discussion in December 2011. Panelists included Professor Laura Hartman and Bangladeshi economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.
Decemeber 14, 2011 FORBES MAGAZINE By Kerry A. Dolan
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.
$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.
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.”
November 3, 2011 – THE NEW YORK TIMES, By David Bornstein
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.
