On 12 January, a crippling earthquake brought Haiti to its knees. Fifty-two aftershocks would follow in a catastrophe that would all but destroy the country's capital of Port-au-Prince. Three million people were affected in the natural disaster that claimed close to a quarter of a million lives, and the world watched in horror as the human tragedy unfolded in the media.
Harvard graduate Leila Chirayath Janah had a causal connection with Haiti. Scarcely a month before the earthquake struck, her 2008 start-up called Samasource had opened a partner office in Haiti. An outsourcing company with a difference, Samasource uses cloud computing and smart workflow processing applications to channel commoditised work like data entry, through to developing markets and emerging economies in micro slices. Given the ease way that money can now be transferred globally, Samasource takes outsourcing work to communities in far-flung rural areas that are desperately poor, in an effort to help push people above the breadline.
Following the Haiti earthquake, Samasource feared that its plans for channelling work to the region would be delayed. But the contrary was true. After the catastrophe, people needed to rebuild their lives and a strong part of that meant finding meaningful income, and through that, generating hope.
“When we heard the news, we thought the programme was over - how could digital work help the people of Haiti in an emergency? It turns out that we were wrong,” wrote Janah in The Huffington Post. “Architecture for Humanity's Cameron Sinclair and a number of other social enterprise leaders have come together to remind us that rebuilding is as important as relief efforts - without a decent way to earn a living, the hundreds of thousands of Haitians flooding into towns neighbouring Port-au-Prince will suffer long beyond the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.”
Speaking to ITWeb from Samasource's offices near Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, Janah explained how outsourcing had changed to make micro-modules of work possible: “The brilliance of the outsourcing model is that for the first time you don't need a lot of hard inputs to do the work. All you need is a brain and an Internet connection and a cheap computing device.”
Empowering the poor
Janah first got the idea to start a humanitarian focused outsourcing company when she did consulting work for a McKinsey offshoot. She was sitting on the floor of her client's huge 12 000 person strong call centre in India when she realised that the model could be replicated to bring meaningful work to the poor. “Outsourcing has changed substantially since that day I sat on that call centre floor in India in 2005. A lot of the work that we are seeing in the outsourcing industry now is basic data entry work, and work process applications have gotten so sophisticated that the work can be parsed out to workers in much smaller units. So a worker can log into a Web-based system and do a simple, single task worth one or two cents, which wasn't possible before people were building Web applications to handle this work.”
The beauty of cloud computing means people in remote areas across the world can be connected to what Janah calls a 'virtual assembly line', which she believes is one of the best tools for fighting poverty. “The major productivity innovation in the 20th century was Henry Ford's assembly line. He figured out a way to break down the making of an incredibly complex machine, the Model T, into small chunks that people with basic training could complete. He moved the Model T from the craftsman's studio into the mainstream. The assembly lines of the future apply this same thinking to digital work,” said Janah.
“According to Unesco, more people will receive a formal education in the next 30 years than in all of human history,” said Janah, adding that there are hundreds of millions of people across the world who need work and who could be employed in virtual assembly lines.
Game changer
“The Internet is the big game changer. We live in a world where so much value is not physical and where, increasingly, value is being produced and consumed virtually.” A good case in point is Zynga, the company that makes those compelling Facebook games like Farmville that people seem to be addicted to and spend so much time playing. Zynga's products are completely digital, yet the company has become a profit machine through micro-payments, so much so that it has attracted massive investment.
All you need is a brain and an Internet connection and a cheap computing device.
Leila Chirayath Janah, founder, Samasource
“What we are learning is that the Internet allows these people to be producers in a revolutionary new way with products that are virtual. More specifically, in the last five years, labour models have emerged that enable workers to be highly distributed. The challenge in the past was that if you wanted to start an outsourcing company, you needed to bring everybody into one centre and into one location. You needed to put down hard phone lines, very high-powered Internet cables and computers with special software. Everyone needed to commute to that centre to do the work because the cost of distributing the work over multiple locations was very high.” Today's cloud computing has changed all that, and since so much work has moved into the cloud, people can access work at secure sites from any location.
“A great example of this new trend is contact centre company LiveOps, which has the world's largest distributed call centre. They have 30 000 agents who all work from home across the United States and which include stay-at-home mothers, veterans and people with disabilities who otherwise wouldn't be able to commute into a more formal workplace. These home-based agents download some software and then are able to take calls just as if they were working in a call centre. LiveOps demonstrates the potential of distributed work models,” said Janah.
In Samasource's case, people can't work from home because many of the marginal people the company employs don't have a computer or Internet access. What Samasource does is create work centres in rural communities in partnership with local entrepreneurs. “Our workers go into one of our centres, which are located in far-flung rural locations where you couldn't get a thousand people to work in one place, but you could get 20 or 30 people.” All that Samasource requires to establish a centre is solar energy and a satellite connection, so there is no reliance on grid electricity or a broadband or connected infrastructure. Because of this, the company contracts with work centres in disparate locations from Pakistan to Uganda, Kenya, India and, of course, Haiti.
With unemployment in South Africa continuing to climb (it currently stands at 25.3%, according to the latest figures) and with joblessness the biggest threat to our economy, Janah's smart business model looks like a very attractive proposition. Janah reckons the global outsourcing market is worth $525 billion. If this country won a small fraction of that using a Samasource type model, it would not only do something about unemployment, but would help develop technical skills and push a greater portion of the population over the breadline.
* Leila Chirayath Janah will speak at Tech4Africa, which is being held on 12 and 13 August.
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