Emprendedorismo tecnológico que supera la pobreza

Meet the entrepreneur who has lifted 15,000 young people over the poverty line

In rural Northern Uganda, a group of workers assemble each day in a shipping container, which is equipped with solar panels on the roof and high-speed Internet access. These workers are trained by an U.S.-based nonprofit organization called Samasource to perform work for fast-growing tech companies like LinkedIn and Eventbrite.

At Samasource’s helm is a 31-year-old San Franciscan: Leila Janah.

Inspiration for the company struck when Janah was just a teenager and teaching English to high school students in Ghana. During this trip, she noticed that the country’s most talented and well-educated young people could not find employment opportunities and were wasting away in slums.

In her 20s, Janah quit her steady day job at a consulting firm to launch Samasource. She became one of the pioneers of a new “microwork” model and the face of the emerging technology-for-good movement.

Today, Samasource is flourishing, with thousands of young people in emerging nations earning a fair wage to perform computer work, including content moderation, photo-tagging, and routine data entry. Samasource takes a small cut of the overall budget from corporate clients to sustain its operations.

I caught up with Janah during a break in preparations for an upcoming fundraiser. Each year, her gala draws Silicon Valley’s most glamorous entrepreneurs, and it typically raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charitable causes. It’s a particularly exciting time for the entrepreneur, who recently announced her engagement to investor and yoga instructor Benjamin Lesley, and a new crowdfunding site called Samahope.

Entrepreneurship meets philanthropy

Samasource is a bit different from most nonprofits, as it aims to generate sustainable revenues. Janah has also borrowed management techniques from the most successful tech companies, like Facebook and Google.

“The nonprofit world is embracing lean business methods and is more comfortable with the idea of experimentation and failure,” she said.

Janah first got the idea when she moved to Ghana as a teenager and made friends with many of the locals, many of whom couldn’t find reasonable employment.

After college, she joined an elite management-consulting firm and went to Southeast Asia to work on a project. In the bustling city of Mumbai, she made the acquaintance of a man living in the slums, the site of the hit indie flickSlumdog Millionaire. “He helped me realize that there were young people with secondary school education living in poverty, who have the skill and will to work,” she told me.

Pioneering the microwork model

Corporations such as Walmart, LinkedIn, eBay, Evenbrite, and Getty Images have already signed up as Samasource clients.

“We have brought these companies into places you would never expect digital work,” she said.

They negotiate a fee with Samasource, and Janah’s team on the ground provides training, equipment, quality assurance, and more. Workers in the developing world receive a fair wage, and with opportunities for career advancement.

Since Janah introduced the microwork model, over 15,000 people have been lifted from the poverty line, and 92 percent move on to higher paying work or higher education. The majority of Samasource’s workers are under 30, and over 50 percent are women, according to Janah.

Starting Samasource

Janah does not hail from a privileged background and has hustled her way up the career ladder. She did not have a nest egg to fall back on when she quit the consulting firm.

“It took a long time to get Samasource off the ground,” she explained. In 2008, she couldn’t afford health insurance and was earning less than $400 a month. She slept on a friend’s futon in San Francisco and tutored over the weekends to make ends meet.

Indeed, starting a nonprofit is not for the faint-hearted. “It’s a slog,” she remarks. “You have to be resilient and in it for the long haul.”

Despite her struggles, Janah believes it has become exponentially easier for anyone to start a nonprofit. New service-oriented startups like Uber and Taskrabbit offer flexible work and a decent hourly wage.

The challenges of running a business

Janah recently experienced some drama on her board of directors, and it’s still fresh on her mind. She emerged from the whole episode with the realization that a far more insidious form of sexism exists: paternalism.

“I used to think that the worst form of discrimination for women was being hit on or hearing something disparaging,” she said. “What’s even more challenging for young women is a very senior male who will take an interest in you, who see themselves as father figures or mentors.”

According to Janah, when there’s a difference in opinion, the relationship will quickly turn nasty.

“These paternal figures can’t handle being defied, and that’s a big problem,” she said.

Janah advises that other entrepreneurs stay true to their vision despite intimidation tactics from older colleagues.

Lessons learned

Janah admits that she hasn’t been the most supportive CEO in the past. However, in her 30s, she’s begun to dedicate more time to managing people and refining her leadership style.

“I used to think my job as a CEO meant managing metrics and meeting goals,” she told me. “But I’ve realized now that’s it’s about managing my board and employees.”

Her advice to fellow female executives? Ensure that others can feel and experience your passion. “True leadership isn’t about having an idea. It’s about having an idea and recruiting other people to execute on this vision,” she said.

Janah admits that she used to dedicate upward of 16 hours a day to her work. “It’s not glamorous, but I think there’s something to be said for the sheer number of hours you can work,” she said. The entrepreneur still intends to work hard, but she has realized that more hours don’t necessarily mean better results.

Her secret to success is that she can survive on very little sleep. “I have a lot of energy, which I pour into the company.” However, for the sake of clarity (and her employees, who don’t all share her stamina), she intends to take short vacations with her fiancé and relax at home. She describes her future husband as an attentive partner, one who deserves her time and attention.

“In the long-term, the only way to be successful in this path is to have a good support network,” she concluded. “I have to invest in that network.”

Venture Beat

Read more »

La penetración móvil en África llega al 80%

African mobile penetration hits 80% (and is growing faster than anywhere else)

John Koetsier

We tend to have certain paradigms about the “developing world” and the “developing world,” including Africa. Including, of course, media-fed images of Africa as a place of almost irredeemable poverty, deprivation, and pain.

Many of our paradigms are, of course, illusions.

A new report on the African telecommunications market highlights that mobile penetration in Africa hit 80 percent in the first quarter of this year, and is still growing at 4.2 percent annually. That’s faster than anywhere else in the world, the report says, and the 54 countries of Africa are, after Asia, the world’s second-largest market.

Which means that today, more than eight in ten Africans have a mobile phone.

In part, that’s driven by a massive reduction in the costs of owning a mobile phone: The average revenue per user for telecom companies has dropped 80 percent between 2001 and 2011. Economies of scale have taken hold now as the basic infrastructure has been built out, and more competition by independent (not state-owned) telecoms has driven down prices.

That’s good for Africans, of course, and good for the market in the long term as well. And there’s still a lot of room to grow, of course.

Most mobile connections — 62.7 percent, or almost two thirds — are basic 2G voice and SMS services, the report says. Of the remaining third, about 27 percent have access to 2.5G for low-speed data, and just 11 percent have 3G access — never mind LTE.

As more and more infrastructure is built, however, data services and connection speeds are increasing. Data revenue for telecoms has grown 67 percent in the key African countries of South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria in the past few years. And while smartphones are cost-prohibitive for some, current penetration is at 20 percent and are project to grow fast — almost 600 percent in Nigeria alone by 2017.

Venture Beat

Read more »

El tiempo de aire de celular como indicador de riqueza en África

Cómo mapear la riqueza en África usando nada más que minutos de telefonía móvil
Por Ritchie Rey @ RitchieSKing hace 4 horas

Un grupo de investigadores belgas ha llegado con una nueva forma (pdf) de mapeo de la distribución de la riqueza en Côte d'mirando la compra de minutos de tiempo aire móvil Ivoire por. Después de peinar grandes cantidades de datos sobre las compras individuales de un operador de telefonía móvil nacional (sin nombre en su informe), descubrieron que, en un país donde predominan los teléfonos de prepago, hay básicamente dos tipos de compradores de tiempo de tiempo de aire: los que hacen grandes compras poco frecuentes, llenando en minutos, y los que compran menos minutos con más regularidad. Su teoría es la re-rellenos son más ricos que los que compran tiempo de aire con frecuencia, por lo que el tamaño promedio de una compra de tiempo aire puede servir como un indicador de riqueza. Y, en efecto, las mayores compras de medios, como el mapa de abajo muestra, ocurren en Abidjan, la capital, y en algunas ciudades del interior, y alrededor de las zonas fronterizas y rutas de comercio.
+
Hay buenas razones para creer en una conexión entre las compras y las riquezas de tiempo de aire. Los proveedores de servicios móviles a través de África permiten a sus clientes transferir minutos entre uno y otro. En Côte d'Ivoire, estas transferencias son especialmente fáciles. El resultado es que el tiempo de uso se utiliza como moneda de cambio en Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana países, Egipto y otros. El tiempo de uso va más allá de ser un indicador de riqueza. En cierto sentido, es la riqueza.

+
Hay una cierta ironía en estudios como éste. La principal razón para hacerlo es que, en países como Côte d'Ivoire, las estadísticas del gobierno pueden ser muy irregulares y poco fiables. Pero la ausencia de estadísticas sólidas significa que los investigadores no tienen forma real de validar sus resultados.
+
Sin embargo, como el mapa indica, van probablemente en el camino correcto.

Quartz

Read more »