The Microwork Solution - Harvard Business Review

The Microwork Solution - Harvard Business Review:

What’s the best way to help the world’s poor? The answer may not be giving them more aid. What people need to break the cycle of poverty is work. A small but growing industry known as “impact sourcing” is addressing that need head-on by hiring people at the bottom of the pyramid to perform digital tasks such as transcribing audio files and editing product databases. Essentially, it’s business process outsourcing aimed at boosting economic development.

Impact sourcing is not unlike microfinancing: It aspires to create meaningful work for and put money in the pockets of the people who need it most. And because it connects new workers—often those who’ve been marginalized, such as Muslim women in Calcutta—to the global supply chain and addresses real needs of first-world companies, it could quickly reach a large scale. In a study commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation last year, Monitor Group estimated that the market for impact sourcing was $4.5 billion in 2010 and would rise to $20 billion by 2015. It also predicted that employment in the industry would grow from 144,000 to 780,000 over the same period.

Samasource, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, is fast becoming a leader in this market. Founded in 2008 by Leila Janah, Samasource is still small: Just 30 people work at the organization’s headquarters, about half in field operations and the remainder spread more or less evenly across sales, technology, fundraising, and internal operations. But it has already established 16 work centers—in South Asia, Africa, and Haiti—which have paid more than $2 million to 3,000-plus workers. That relatively large impact suggests that the organization’s approach has a lot of promise.

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