IPhone App Provides Kenyan Refugees With Jobs (VIDEO)

iPhone application can provide jobs for refugees in Kenya, but the folks behind the Give Work App are dreaming big!

Give Work is a joint effort between Samasource, a non-profit organization working to provide Internet-based jobs for poor people around the world, and CrowdFlower, a San Francisco based company that provides accessible outsourced labor as an online service. Dadaab, Kenya is home to extreme poverty and the largest refugee camp in the world. Through the Give Work system, refugees in Dadaab receive Internet training and well-paying, dignified jobs.

You can download the Give Work Application to your iPhone and donate your time to help refugees now!

Here's how it works:

1. A U.S. company submits an online job to CrowdFlower to be completed by a refugee in Dadaab, Kenya.
2. The refugee at Samasource completes the task immediately.
3. An iPhone user in the U.S. donates their time to double check the work.
4. The company that requested the work receives quick results, that are double checked for accuracy. The refugee worker is paid for their work and is able to improve their quality of life. And the iPhone user...well, they get to alleviate their boredom while helping others!

Meet Paul and Eric, two of the Samasource employees in Kenya whose lives have been improved by the job training and steady source of income:

Download the Give Work Application to your iPhone today!

This article was originally written by Erica Liepmann and posted on Causecast.org

Comments

[Ben Parker]

The first refugee has a southern Sudanese name. He is very unlucky if in Dadaab.

But hey, you can tell from the jungle drums it's Africa, right?

So, according to the subtext here, nobody in Dadaab can actually do any intellectual work without it being riddled with errors so it has to be checked by some waster on their iPhone in the US. Duh.

And I thought txteagle was a bit off the wall.

Andrea, you are such a party pooper. Really.

[AndreaBohnstedt]

How do the guys in Dadaab get paid? Per job? Per month? Mobile money transfer?

What's Samasource's business model? And Crowdflowers? Are they for profit? Non profit? If the latter, they'll forever depend on donations, and will be restricted in their growth (in contrast to a for-profit that can growth with market demand).

And finally:
How about doing an article about all the proper commercial ICT ventures and companies in Kenya (East Africa? Sub-Saharan Africa?) rather than yet another 'heartwarming story' out of Africa?

[AndreaBohnstedt]

Dadaab should have been closed ages ago. The conflict in Somalia is not going to end anytime soon, and locking up an ever increasing number of people in squalid conditions in the middle of nowhere helps nobody apart from the NGOs running the camps.

Regarding the article, I have a great many questions:

Power supplies are a problem even in Nairobi - how do they work around that in Dadaab? Generators? Who pays for them? Samasource? Crowdflower?

The two guys in the video don't look very Somali - are they part of a non-Somali refugees population in Dadaab? Is the lab in Dadaab? Neat facility! Who pays for the laptop? Is that investment recovered? Who provides the internet connection in Dadaab? I don't think the fibreoptic cable made its way up there yet, so their connection must be slow and expensive. Who pays for that?

I'd love to see a few examples of the kind of work that is being outsourced. The people who quality-check on a volunteer basis - do they make corrections? How does it work when they find the quality substandard? Do they interact with the guy/girl who did the work, or Crowdflower, or Samasource? And follow up on whether corrections have been made? How much time do they invest on average (same as the actual research?)? Do Samasource assume liability for the quality of the research provided? Or the volunteers? Or who?