DignifAI

The Venezuelan exodus of 5+ million people has been primarily concentrated on the already fragile labor markets of neighboring countries in Latin America. The massive influx of people pits refugees against local communities in a race to the bottom for low end jobs, increasing unemployment, underemployment, and poverty spillovers. Through a work-study program, DignifAI recruits, trains, and arranges appropriate conditions to match the youth bulge of these vulnerable populations to upskilling opportunities and outsourced work. The distribution of data annotation tasks is an effective springboard to accelerate economic integration, while providing access to supplemental income that accommodates the educational time commitment. The data annotation market will reach $3.5 billion by 2025. DignifAI is a technology-initiative that provides the vulnerable and displaced populations of Latin America the opportunity to participate in the value chain of the growing AI market, contribute to the global economy, and access a pathway towards economic inclusion. 

Scale: In 2019, 55% of the Latin American workforce was informally employed, and approximately ___ was unemployed. This situation has been aggravated by the systematic shock of the Venezuelan migration crisis, which the UNHC has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent Latin American history. The Venezuelan crisis is expected to reach 6.5M people by 2023, of which 5.5M will be residing in Latin American countries, and over 2M in Colombia. Today, Colombia holds the second largest IDP population in the world after Syria, combining Venezuelan refugees and Colombian IDP´s from its decades long armed conflict. This situation has deepened with the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, approximately 91% of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia were participating in the formal or informal labor markets, but this participation has now dropped to under 20%.

Opportunity: The inability of the region’s governments to respond fiscally to integrate these displaced populations into their economies poses a scenario of growing cultural-inequality and social frictions that will last generations and are reminiscent of textbook vacuum induced civil-conflict. Beyond the struggling humanitarian response, the private sector must participate to integrate the productive capacity of this vulnerable community by creating new employment opportunities and promoting social entrepreneurial innovation. 

Value Proposition: DignifAI is a technology social venture that provides vulnerable populations the tools and conditions to perform AI data annotation services and learn new digital skills. Our value proposition is to develop a portfolio of AI data annotation services to multiple industries and regions at cost and quality parity. The operational backbone of DignifAI is the recruitment, training, and implementation of a work-study program for the region’s displaced population and their vulnerable host communities.

Structure: Our work-study model will provide baseline technical skills for micro-task completion, together with upskilling opportunities curated through our e-learning content partnerships. Our direct revenue channels will be two-fold, the first being project-based high-complexity labelling microtasks to be project managed by an in-house team and executed by the top performers of our work-study curriculum. The second will be the scalable DignifAI mobile platform which will allow graduates and external registrants to find volume-heavy, low-complexity, labeling microtasks populated by our clients. We will be market leaders in working together with this regional community and offer global access to a growing and marginalized work supply.     

Who: In our first market of Cucuta, on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, we will invest in the recruitment, education, and employment of Venezuelans refugees and Colombian IDP´s who are unemployed or underemployed. We will target the youth bulge by employing men and women aged 16-49 who have become vulnerable targets for prostitution, armed recruitment, and aporophobia. With our local NGO partners, we will recruit candidates who have been unemployed for 6 months or more.

How: Through the branch of employment and the seed of education, DignifAI will recruit driven workers to participate in our work-study program as a steppingstone into the host economy, enabling them to access income and develop new skills. After their time with DignifAI we want individuals to have the tools to find progressive employment opportunities, and to recover that missing confidence and sense of conviction that is often stripped away during the lonely odyssey of forced displacement.

Finally, local communities often feel neglected by international humanitarian initiatives, and with DignifAI we hope to soften that competitive resentment between migrant and local communities by creating new employment opportunities for both.

Venezuelan refugees have become the most vulnerable segment of the South American BOP, and Colombian IDP’s have been the laissez-faire subsegment of society for decades. Both communities are also the last to reach any fiscal aid being distributed by governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The key impact metrics of DignifAI are the employment, productivity, and integration of these discombobulated communities into the formal economy.

DignifAI will invest in developing a sustainable portfolio of recession and pandemic-proof AI-labelling services and democratize the workflow through a remote-mobile platform. 

Latin America: We do not aim to reinvent the wheel, but rather introduce the wheel in a critical labor market. The market leaders in AI Impact Sourcing are Samasource, Cloudfactory, and Digital Divide Data (DDD). All three are focused on Africa, with DDD having started in South East Asia and Cloudfactory in Continental Asia. Very little investment has been directed at Latin America, and basically zero in South America.

Untapped Workforce: DignifAI will be the first to focus in this region’s BOP communities. We want to unleash the potential of  the massive workforce of our target communities and become the market leader in the Americas. By doing so we will be tapping into a workflow gap currently concentrated in African and Asian time zones, and through partnerships be able to offer a 24-hour annotation loop.

Spanish & Portuguese: DignifAI seeks to improve the operational synergy between education, employment, and culture. We will contextualize the operation by partnering with e-learning platforms designed in Spanish and Portuguese, and curated based on local labor market trends. This mobile platform will be the first to be designed in Spanish and Portuguese in accordance with the needs of our student-freelancers and to maximize attrition and productivity. We will also invest in the development of our in-house mobile platform with the ultimate goal of scaling usage and generating macro-related data on these communities that is currently unavailable to academic and public sector organizations. 

Mobile Platform: The core technology for DignifAI is a 2-sided platform available for both mobile and computers. On one side, clients can upload their digital work through an API and on the other freelancers are able to create a profile, have their skills assessed, be matched to adequate tasks and training, and get their payment. This solution integrates many existing features, from API to machine learning for improved matching. Matching is a key feature, as it will require breaking down the tasks received by clients into smaller packages and matching them with freelancers that have developed the appropriate skills. More than just a marketplace, the DignifAI platform is a hybrid between a BPO and a traditional freelance platform.

Curation & Partnerships: Additionally, we will leverage existing solutions for the e-learning and payment components, for which we have already started conversations with potential partners. We will also use the best in class technology to ensure quality control for data annotation and mobile user experience. The key differentiation of the DignifAI platform is that it will be tailored for a Latin American workforce. Because of the learning curve in developing a platform of this scale and expectations, we will begin using third-party platforms that will allow us to distribute annotation tasks under a lean and variable cost structure. In the long run, with the data accumulated on participants, we aim to incorporate a feature to facilitate their connections to formal jobs outside the platform.

For the freelance side of the platform, we have already developed a Proof of Concept version, which enabled 19 users (Brazilian, Venezuelan, and Haitian women) to have their own profile and perform tagging of over 70.000 images. Their work enabled the creation of a machine learning application which identifies over 100 wild animal species with 96% accuracy and saved our client 10 days per month of repetitive labor by biologists.

We will start using third party platforms and have started conversations with Labelbox as a potential partner. Our partner collaborator in Europe, Humans in the Loops, also an MIT Challenge applicant, has also used Labelbox for many years and recommend the platform. They have worked with dozens of non-profits and academic institutions to provide the AI-annotation tool for environmental, humanitarian, and medical research projects. The reliability of their platform as a temporary tool can be determined by the prestige of their academic and non-profit clientele: https://labelbox.com/academic

70 million people are globally displaced.  80% of refugees live in neighboring countries to their places of origin, in cities already struggling with unemployment and underemployment. Currently, 60% of refugees live in urban centers, an increasing percentage. 90% of urban refugees have 3G coverage and penetration of smartphones is steeply increasing.

The massive influx of people pits refugees against poor locals in a race to the bottom for low end jobs, increasing poverty. The reality is that local economies in frontier regions don’t have the structure to fully absorb vulnerable populations in their fragile local markets. The answer is two-fold: (1) meet the urgent need for income by connecting people to outside opportunities, and (2) build skills, so that vulnerable populations can be part of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Through DignifAI, the BOP can access income, develop new skills, and increase their chances of integrating into the global economy. A tailored hybrid between a traditional BPO and a freelance platform, DignifAI is re-branching the labor market to permit economic integration and break the poverty cycle. On one hand, we work with local partners to ensure conditions and infrastructure for people to do remote work. On the other, we are developing a mobile platform, to democratize access to digital work and upskilling opportunities at scale.

We have already seen the impact of our theory of change in our pilot in Brazil. Through many local partnerships, we facilitated access to infrastructure and created conducive conditions for women to do remote work (including creating a supervised space for their kids). For some, was the first time working with a computer. We provided digital and soft skills training and access to curated digital work. As output, they developed new skills, increased their income, and all reported a stronger sense of empowerment. As outcome, some of them were able to get new jobs, other used the extra income to buy a fridge and now has her own business selling yogurt. One of the Brazilian participants explicitly mentioned this experience dismantled her prejudice against Venezuelans. We have seen more social cohesion, improved livelihoods, and economic integration.

Present: In 2017 DignifAI conducted a pilot in Greece to train and match to digital work 11 refugees in the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos. In 2019 a second pilot was conducted in Boa Vista Brazil, this time working with 19 Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Haitian women in image-labelling and data transcript microtasks through the DignifAI PoC software. To date we have helped 30 individuals with basic image tagging, soft-skill reinforcement, and fair-value compensation. As put by Venezuelan refugee, Luisiana: “I couldn’t believe it. Besides learning something new, I will receive payment? I will never forget this experience because it was my first opportunity in Brazil”        

Year One: Our short-term strategy is focused on recruiting the workforce from the Cucuta region, on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. During the first year we expect to have eight cohorts of 60 people depending on business development progress and the curation of our e-learning curriculum. This will yield a student-freelancers base of approximately 500 “beta beneficiaries” after year one.

Year 5: Our addressable market will begin with the displaced populations of Colombia to maximize impact and operational momentum. Moving forward, with the ongoing development of our mobile platform our goal is to expand to other regions in Colombia and then to other countries in Latin America. By year five, our model forecasts a workforce presence in seven countries in Latin America through our mobile reach, and a student-freelancer reach of 75,000 to 125,000 mobile workers.

Core Metrics: Our initial workforce market in year one will be sourced in Cucuta, on the Colombian-Venezuelan border. We want to maintain a lean administrative structure in the short-term and not overwhelm our resources. We will therefore focus our short-term impact measurements on the following core metrics:

• Number of workers that move out of poverty,
• Number of workers that integrate into the formal economy after working with DignifAI.

Secondary Metrics: Our approach to scale is to expand to other regions as our operational and technological capacity grows. In year two we plan to start adding two Colombian cities per year, as well as adding one-two new countries per year. Through our mobile platform we plan on leveraging technology for scalability and data generation. Starting in year two, we will ramp up our impact measurement with the following impact and operational metrics:

• Impact: Literacy and digital skill upskilling,
• Impact: Family wellbeing
• Impact: Financial inclusion (banking usage).
• Operational: Workforce ARPU,
• Operational: Workforce platform attrition. 

Spillover Impact: Through our growth and traction we hope to generate the following spillover effects:

• Motivate NGO’s to redirect traditional humanitarian resources towards economic integration initiatives. 
• Generate data to the public and academic sectors about the fiscal potential of investing in integration initiatives for displaced communities.
• We want to brush aside the current alternatives for youth prostitution and armed recruitment and identify a direct correlation between digital hiring and the downtrend of these activities. 

Recruitment: In Cucuta the overwhelming flow of young refugee men and women in desperate conditions can often seem intimidating. Promoting DignifAI could be a challenge given the potential security risks and the competing recruitment services we will run into (prostitution, armed recruitment, smuggling, and other).

Business Development: While the data annotation market is growing, there is still skepticism about the hiring of impact outsourcing alternatives. The main bottleneck for this industry is ensuring a sustainable flow of outsourced work from AI companies and other tech clients. In Latin America this concept is practically nonexistent, so we will have to create the market and prove that we can deliver at competitive market prices and quality, with the plus of having a social impact.

Financial: A large percentage of our student-freelancers target market is unlinked from the financial industry; they are unbanked and depend on cash transactions. How to compensate a remote workforce is a typical BOP challenge, and one that will require further critical thinking in this post-COVID environment. We have started conversations with different fintechs to explore partnerships.

Quality Control Management: The AI industry is no longer an industry defined by “a race to the bottom,” and thus quality control of service output is required for sustainable growth and low client churn. Developing best in class quality control solutions is a challenge.

Recruitment: The first decision is that our leadership will be based in ground zero. Enrique is expected to spend 60% of the first year in Cucuta developing the foundations of the business and developing the local team. The second decision is to work closely with NGO partners, specifically in the areas of recruitment, security, and community engagement.

Business Development: The other 40% will be spent in business development. The strategy will be to start with regional SME`s to perfect our project management and quality control systems. We will also work closely with our European partner Humans in the Loop, also an MIT Solve Challenge applicant, as a subcontracted workforce for their projects. The next step will be to approach larger-international companies with at-par quality and cost service.

Financial: We want to be part of the movement that empowers the BOP to use  phones as essential tools for income generation. In the short term we want to develop a partnership with local fintech company Coink as well as local bank Davivienda. As our mobile platform matures, a payment API will be critical and onboarding support will be prioritized.

Quality Control Management: Hiring an experienced CTO will be a priority for the development of Quality Control SOP’s, KPI’s, and project management. Furthermore, the hiring of day-to-day ICT supervisors will be equally important, also leveraging peer-to-peer support. Lastly, our mobile development strategy will be scaled on-par with the improvement of our service-performance to ensure a quality-driven brand reputation.  

DignifAI is the project name. The legal name of the company is Dignify Inc. It is registered in Delaware. 

Full-time: 

Enrique Garcia, CEO and Managing Partner. Based between Barranquilla and Cucuta, Colombia.

Part-time: 

Laura Oller, Co-founder and Chairwoman. Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Henrique Sanchez, Project Coordinator. Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil Jorge Botello, Community Coordinator, based in Cucuta, Colombia.

Contractors: 

Jonathan Beltran, NGO Partnership coordinator, based in Bogota, Colombia.

Melissa Arrazola, Sales, based in Barranquilla, Colombia. Freyman Rendon, Communications, based in Cucuta, Colombia. 

As a start-up technology company, we need to maintain an ongoing culture of innovation, which includes the development of an in-house mobile platform from Proof-of-concept to MVP to Launch, as well as the curation and delivery of e-learning content. At the same time, we need to invest in workforce recruitment, onboarding, training, and development in order to ensure high quality service output. Finally, we need to apply the vision of maximizing social and economic impact for our student-freelancers communities – balancing the triple bottom-line will require long-term vision and cash-flow discipline.

            Our leadership team is ideally prepared to build the proper foundations for growth and impact. Laura brings the vision and initiative of having bred the idea from theory to pilot-concept in the last couple of years. Her Harvard MBA/MPP and her experience at the IFC in Brazil and Africa have uniquely positioned her to understand and monitor BOP needs and trends, while developing partnership with strategic players in the international development ecosystem.

Enrique Garcia grew up in Venezuela and has spent the last year in Colombia writing about the Migration crisis and working with local foundations as part of his Masters program at the London School of Economics. He also brings eight years of business management skills and entrepreneurship experience in the US, Asia, and Latin America. Under the shared vision, this management team will look to grow the team through hires, equity partners, and volunteers based on technical skill needs and a shared social impact compass. 

Business Development: We have an agreement with Humans in the Loop, an AI Impact Sourcing business based in Bulgaria, to conduct a pilot cohort in Cucuta in Q4, 2020. We will be providing the workforce, and HiTL will source the work supply. This relationship will be designed to grow in both directions, establishing an attractive value proposition to clients by offering a 24hrs annotation workflow that shortens project completion timelines.  Additionally, we have 12 LOIs from potential clients, mostly for AI tasks, willing to work with us once we have a functioning MVP platform. 

Education: We have a LOI with Peru-based Silabuz, which offers e-learning content in ICT subjects exclusively in Spanish language. We also have a working relationship with Cucuta-based Fundacion Hablemos, the local partner of UNDP and UNHCR, for soft-skill training delivery.

Operational and Community Support: Fundacion Hablemos will be our operational arm in the recruitment of initial cohorts. We have engaged the UNDP and the DRC (Danish Refugee Council) in Colombia to start working with them once we present more traction and impact metrics. These partnerships will be important to minimize cultural and social frictions specific to these delicate regions.

Promotion: Having conducted our pilot in Boa Vista together with the IFC, we have continued working with them to promote the results of the pilot by developing video and promotional material for DignifAI, to make the case for impact outsourcing in Latin America.

The core business model of DignifAI is to source AI work supply from international clients and distribute the work supply to our student-freelancers workforce through an online and app-platform.

Beneficiaries: The value proposition for our is providing access to income-generating digital work. By providing the necessary training for the tasks, as well as upskilling e-learning content, DignifAI is essentially consolidating workforce value while at the same time investing to springboard the workforce towards progressive opportunities in the labor market.

Key Costumers: DignifAI will focus on sourcing work form the tech and AI industries. This approach will take advantage of the growing AI market, the consistent and growing volume of simple annotation tasks, and its growing interest by Latin American governments. Tech companies investing in AI are looking for diversified suppliers of data annotation, with the underlining criteria of cost and quality-parity.

Operating Strategy: DignifAI’s workforce will be our most important asset. An active and engaged community of workers is necessary for our model to work. The larger and more qualified the community, the more powerful and useful our service to client organizations becomes. We will work hand in hand with local NGO partners to support us in the on-the-ground recruitment, training, and community-building tasks.

Resource Strategy: DignifAI will be financed by Grant capital to grow from pilot-stage to MVP-stage, which we anticipate will take two years. After that, DignifAI will prioritize private capital fundraising to maintain a triple-bottom line social venture DNA. 

DignifAI currently counts with a capital stack composed of grant funds and founder contributions. This balance will be used to start hiring and training operations in Colombia, while in parallel doing business development for the initial work supply from national and regional technology clients. During the first year we will work with a third-party data-annotation platform to generate traction and operational momentum, generating revenue on an aggregate task sum per project. Our strategy is to fundraise grant capital to vertically scale the development of our mobile platform to create an MVP product.

In year two we plan on already having operational traction and an MVP product with commercial momentum. At this point we plan on fundraising private capital to finance business development, workforce scalability, and horizontally scaling through regional expansion. When our mobile platform is fully deployed, we will extend our business development efforts to work with international companies.

Through our platform we plan to generate revenue by maximizing high-complexity microtasks that have higher gross margins to cross-subsidize lower complexity microtasks to the largest possible workforce. Our  platform will coordinate the matching of workers and microtasks based on this strategy.

The inspiration to apply to Solve is to become part of the MIT community. Our first step is to create an impactful workflow of recruitment, assessment, training, and engagement of student-freelancers. We want strategic guidance from other business entrepreneurs and academics in the AI field to develop best-practices for our AI service goals. We also want to leverage the experience of organizations and mentors who have worked in similar fields around the world to best prepare our solution to be border agnostic. In the long-term we want to help different cultures, segments, and demographics in the Latin American region, and our roots have to allow for this scalability.

The second reason is to pitch for one of the funding prizes in order to accelerate the technical development of our mobile software. While we are confident that we can create a lean operation with steady revenue and impact growth to fundraise the private capital needed, we would prefer to link our business with MIT funding in order to have a direct link to the academic and professional community. By receiving these funds, we would be able to accelerate the technology development while directing our private capital sources towards the operational growth and impact processes.

Mobile Technology development: We want to work with the MIT community to guide us in the development of a scalable, border-agnostic, and BOP oriented mobile platform. We also want to work with Coink, a Colombian Fintech company that shares a BOP vision.

e-learning content development: We want to work with multiple e-learning content providers, including academic institutions and social enterprises. We want to work with Silabuz, a Spanish-delivered e-learning company from Peru, and Reprograma, a Portuguese e-learning company from Brazil.

 Business Development: We want to work with Humans in the Loop, a Solve 2020 candidate, to generate a shared workforce loop, as well as continue working with Nindoo and Turivius from which we have sourced work from in our prior pilot programs.

Board of Advisors: We want to accelerate the social business ecosystem in South America. As part of this vision, we want to create working relationships with local governments, economists, NGOS, and private sector to better promote alternatives for economic and digital inclusion. As such, we want to facilitate the connection of leadership and innovation in the region with the best in class reference on knowledge and technology that MIT represents.

International Organizations: We want to work together with international organizations that have been extending their presence in Colombia due to the migration crisis. Organizations we want to work with include IDB Lab, IDB Invest and Ashoka to coordinate potential fellowships and volunteer programs. We plan on being at the IDB Invest conference in Barranquilla in October 2020.      

DignifAI’s raison d’être and mission is to improve opportunities for self-reliance and economic integration to people experiencing forced displacement. We appreciate their admirable resilience and strength and aim to provide them the tools and the means to live their lives with dignity, responding to the many challenges they face. There is a large gap between the hardships of their unstable reality on the move and settling in in new host communities to full integration. We believe the key to bridge this gap is education for the 4IR and access to income. To enable those, we leverage technology. However, our secret sauce is tailoring solutions to the specific realities of those experiencing displacement. On our two pilots to date we built strong partnerships with local organizations who helped us create safe and conducive spaces for learning and working. We saw the impact in terms of improved social cohesion, more confidence, new skills, and access to better jobs. There are many great initiatives already. DignifAI is willing to partner with those while leveraging technology to be a catalyzer for change centered on improving livelihoods. 

For people at the bottom of the pyramid, especially for those facing the hardships of forced displacement, it is impossible to focus on developing new skills while you need to hustle everyday to provide for your family. Nevertheless, it is indeed key to build digital skills to have a chance to integrate the 4IR and not be left behind. The solution is to tailor solutions to the reality of those most vulnerable, and enable them a chance to develop new skills while also accessing income. That’s what DignifAI does. We work with local partners and leverage technology to democratize access to remote work and education. Through our mobile platform, we will unleash the untapped potential of Latin Americans who only need a chance to productively contribute to the global economy. 

DignifAI is possible due to the growing AI market and is powered by AI and machine learning to better match those in most need to concrete pathways towards better livelihoods in the context of the 4IR. We believe AI for Humanity must be inclusive, providing people all over the world an opportunity to participate in AI’s global value chain. Currently, Latin American talent and workforce are left behind on the growing AI market and its correlated solutions, such as Impact Outsourcing. Dignify exists to ensure vulnerable communities in Latin America have a chance to contribute to the global economy and to the development of AI. By doing so, while we are providing better livelihoods for those who need it the most, we are also expanding the supply of data annotation services, overcoming the bottleneck of human work that still prevents the full potential of machine learning to be realized and accessible to all, for all.