THE very poorest people on the planet have benefited little from the digital economy, but a pilot project in African refugee camps has hinted at how that might change. Refugees at the camps in Kenya have been able to dramatically increase their income by tapping into a global demand for unskilled digital labour.
The project uses , a website that allows companies to quickly outsource routine tasks such as transcription and image-tagging to online workers. 鈥淲e can generate an incredible amount of social impact through this technology,鈥� says Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of , the San Francisco-based charity behind the project.
Workers typically receive a few cents per task and companies can often get jobs done in minutes. CrowdFlower lets companies choose from several virtual pools of labour, including Amazon鈥檚 鈥溾�� service.
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Thanks to Samasource鈥檚 work, a group of over 150 refugees in the three camps at Dadaab will soon make up one of those pools. Over the last two months, a pilot group of 16 workers has been given access to computers and trained on a range of tasks, including a data-entry job for a mapping company. The firm uses software to identify roads in aerial images, but its software sometimes mistakenly tracks other features, such as lines of parked cars. The refugees check each image and decide whether the software has done its job.
After an unpaid trial period, the workers started taking paid tasks late last month. They have been earning around US$2 per hour; the typical income among the camps鈥� 250,000 inhabitants is $50 per month. Lukas Biewald of San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, says that the 16 refugees have received $1200 so far. Samasource now has funding to train another 150 refugees and is also working with Kenyans outside the camps. Meanwhile, it is in talks regarding a second refugee-camp project, this time in northern India.
Biewald says that firms like the feel-good factor that comes with using the Dadaab workers. And the results can be more reliable than those from other labour pools. 鈥淭he refugees have more interest in a long-term relationship,鈥� says Biewald.
CrowdFlower and Samasource have also released GiveWork, an iPhone application that lets users donate their labour: its users complete the same tasks as the Dadaab workers, but the fee for those jobs is paid to the Dadaab team instead.
Later this month, cellphone users in Kenya will be able to sign up to txteagle, another remote-working service that distributes translation and image tasks by cellphone. , a cellphone technology researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the developer of txteagle, estimates that 15 million Kenyans will be interested in taking part.
