2. The Premise
Technology and knowlege jobs can lift entire families
out of poverty.
Work
Home
Bombay, India
Bombay, India
Call center floor
Dharavi, South Asia’s largest slum
Many of India’s 1M BPO workers commute
Over 2.5M people living on 175 hectares
from slum areas
3. Socially Responsible Outsourcing
Talented people in
Foreign capital Small firms
poor regions
$$$
a small slice of the
$160B services
outsourcing industry
untapped talent
micro-, small- and
mid-sized businesses
Socially responsible outsourcing promotes economic
development and reduces poverty
4. Case Study: Digital Divide Data
Location: Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Vientiane, Laos
Nonprofit social venture led by Harvard
•
graduate Jeremy Hockenstein
Started in Phnom Penh in 2002 with 25
•
employees
Types of services: form and survey
•
processing, transcription, digitization
Offers education for sex-trafficked women,
•
on-site medical care, scholarship program
(financed through donations)
Currently employs 500+ people at 3x
•
Cambodian minimum wage
Operationally self-sufficient with revenue from
•
services for clients including the Harvard
Crimson
5. Case Study: Himalayan Techies
Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
Social venture led by American Ellie
•
Skeele and Nepali MIT Grad Rabi
Kamacharya
Started in Kathmandu in 2000 with 3
•
people to provide jobs for educated
but underpriviledged Nepalis
Types of services: Software and web
•
application development, IT
“I was working in Bangalore before. Now I am
consulting
home, in Nepal, working on better technology
and allowed to give my opinion about how
Projects include One Laptop Per
•
things should be done. I feel like I am
Child and Open Learning Exchange
respected at HT.”
programs
Provides training, on-site recreational
• Prakash Gautam, Technical Lead at
facilities, and direct exposure to Himalayan Techies
clients
6. Case Study: Drishtee BPO
Location: Bihar, India
Award-winning social venture led by
•
Satyan Mishra and Kunal Chawla
Started in Delhi in 2000 to leverage
•
technology in rural poverty alleviation
Types of services: Transcription,
•
online research, survey and form
processing
Distributed rural delivery model
•
reduces risk and taps into skilled
rural workers
Provides in-depth training for
•
workers with little prior experience
7. Case Study: Daproim Africa
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Run by Steve Muthee, a young entrepreneur
•
from rural Kenya
Started in 2006 with 4 people
•
Types of services: form and survey processing,
•
transcription, digitization, web development
Offers part-time work to local university students
•
and facilities for disabled workers
Plans to grow to 20-30 people
•
First large project branded as a socially
•
responsible outsourcing firm: $13K
In pipeline: projects for clients including
•
Benetech, a Bay Area nonprofit, and the African
Braille Center
8. Case Study: Preciss International
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Run by two women, Mugure Mugo and
•
Ivy Kimani
Started in 2002 with 5 employees
•
Types of services: online research, data
•
processing, subtitling, transcription
Offers part-time work and on-site
•
training to university students, young
mothers and recent graduates
Planned growth to 70-80 employees
•
30% of revenue goes to floor
•
employees
In pipeline: projects between $10K and
•
$100K for clients in the US and UK
9. Case Study: Oriak Digital
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
View Video >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjD97YlNhDU
11. The Problem: Talent Surplus
32 million rural Chinese leave their towns each
year for big cities, in search of work
45 million rural Chinese youth are currently
enrolled in senior secondary schools
Source: Wang, Dewen. “China’s Rural Compulsory Education: Current Situation, Problems and Policy Alternatives.” Working Paper Series No.36. 2003
The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)
reports that there are 130 million surplus
workers in rural India
Source: “Rural BPO.” Drishtee BPO Presentation. March 2008.
Over 990,000 young people graduate
from secondary and tertiary institutions in
Ghana and Kenya each year and face
staggering unemployment
Source: Kenya Ministry of Education; Ghana Ministry of Education; Samasource research November 2007 - March 2008.
12. Socially Responsible Outsourcing: Definition 1.0
Right now, it’s a nascent set of guiding principles for buyers who want to help low-income
and socially disadvantaged people pull themselves out of poverty.
Buyers are encouraged to follow any 2 of the 3 principles in choosing a service provider for
outsourcing work.
Principle Clarification
1
Includes firms located in: (a) a developing country, as
Hire firms in low-income defined by the World Bank*; (b) an economically
countries distressed region (e.g., Ceara, Brazil; Bihar, India)
2
Hire micro-, small- and mid-
Includes firms that employ between 1 and 249 people
sized firms
3
Hire firms that are owned “Disadvantaged” means: belonging to an ethnic or
by, or employ a majority of, religious minority group, living at or under the poverty
disadvantaged people line, physically or mentally disabled
13. How the guiding principles were developed
Samasource spearheaded a series of conversations with many organizations from
November 2007 to July 2008 to help develop the “1.0” version of these guidelines.
They are only the beginning. In this first iteration, we left out several important
considerations, such as labor and environmental standards for service providers.
It is our hope that these principles evolve into the first fair trade system for
services.
To learn more, please visit www.sourceoutpoverty.org.
Organizations consulted
Responsible business groups Service Providers
+
Buyers
Academics
Industry
Consultants
14. Positive Social Impact
Socially responsible outsourcing creates positive social impact by:
Outsourcing jobs in sub-Saharan Africa
1
Ghana
directly generating jobs for skilled Senegal
workers in low-income regions with Kenya
high unemployment levels Uganda
0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000
1 direct job 2.5 indirect jobs
2
indirectly generating jobs for
semi- and unskilled workers
3
reducing skilled-labor emigration, or
“brain drain,” in low-income regions
