DignifAI Impact Sourcing

More than 5.5 million Venezuelan migrants have fled their country due to the country's humanitarian crisis - of which 4.2 million are spread across Latin America. This displacement has pitted migrants against host communities in a race for low-end jobs, extending the downward spiral of unemployment, underemployment, and social instability. DignifAI believes in the role that the private sector must play in developing solutions for long-term integration. 

To address this regional challenge, DignifAI offers data-labeling outsourcing services to organizations that require supervised training of their Machine Learning models. DignifAI recruits and trains migrant and host individuals in Cucuta, Colombia, and Boa Vista, Brazil, to complete this microwork under our supervision and technological tools. Our Theory of Change is that, by sourcing AI micro-work, DignifAI can operate as a springboard for employment inclusion, developing the basic workplace and digital skills of these individuals while generating a dignified wage.

Latin America has always struggled with high rates of structural unemployment; by 2019 it reached 8.1%. With the COVID pandemic, these rates increased to 15.8% by Q2 of 2020, all while the region was dealing with the Venezuelan migration crisis - the region’s largest displacement in modern history. Today, Colombia has over 1.8M Venezuelan migrants, by far the most in the continent, with 77.5% of them having no intention of returning to Venezuela, 90% of them being informally employed or unemployed, and 58% of them being within the productive ages of 16-39. 

Despite the fiscal shock that all host countries are facing to respond to this migration crisis, the situation also presents a unique opportunity that can give the economy a long-term productivity boost of up to + 0.30% of GDP by 2030 if proper integration is achieved. In view of this, DignifAI believes the private sector plays a critical role in integrating these vulnerable communities and that the grassroot response should be led by entrepreneurial efforts. The most effective way of promoting frictionless labor integration is by creating new employment and vocational upskilling opportunities linked and sourced from international technology supply chains.

DignifAI is outsourcing Dignity with Artificial intelligence. Our model is a dual-education program that combines vocational training, upskilling, and employment development in a hybrid remote and in-person structure. Through their experience with AI Micro-work, our workers develop specific skills by performing data-labeling tasks - including image and language annotation, data collection, text analysis, and database cleaning. 

This combination of digital micro-work and training is the foundation of the economic inclusion ladder, helping our beneficiaries develop the baseline digital skills required to boost their integration into the global gig-economy and formal employment opportunities. We also give them support in developing the soft skills they need in any work environment such as communication, punctuality, teamwork, and working on deadlines.

DignifAI is introducing these individuals to an ecosystem of productivity and improving their probability of breaking their poverty cycle. 

Finally, while receiving this vocational training, our workers earn a dignified wage. The payment is structured as a temporary freelance employment opportunity and is calculated as a fixed and variable stack, with the floor being the legal minimum wage of the host country and the added opportunity of earning more based on performance incentives. On average our payouts have been 1.3+ the minimum wage. 

DignifAI operates in the epicenter of the second largest migration crisis in the world (Villa del Rosario, Cucuta), on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. This region is the main doorway of the migration flow and is also the Colombian department (state) with the highest unemployment rate in Colombia (22.2%) and economic informality (72%). We also have operations on the second border with Venezuela (Boa Vista, Brazil) - which has the highest rate of gender-based violence in that country.

Our mission in both locations is to invest in the recruitment, education, and employment of Venezuelan migrants, women, and IDP’s who are unemployed or underemployed. We are targeting the youth bulge by recruiting men and women aged 16-39 who have become vulnerable targets for prostitution, armed recruitment, and aporophobia in these border communities. Together with our local NGO partners, we recruit candidates who are informally employed or have been unemployed for at least 3 months. The Impact TAM is calculated with the following affected communities:

• 77.5% of migrants do not intend to return to Venezuela (permanent migrants)
• 90% of migrants are either employed or underemployed
• 80% of migrants are aged 16-39,

Together, this creates a potential productivity pool of 3.5-4M people with labor market integration needs in South American host countries. 

We believe our solution has the ingredients to be a commercial value generator as well as an impact generator. We are the only private-led solution in the epicenter of this massive crisis, with all other solutions being led by NGOs or public authorities. We are on a mission to match the exciting growth prospects of the Artificial Intelligence field with the sad growth prospects of the Venezuelan Migration crisis and its deep impact in this continent. We have identified a niche strategy that has the potential to grow, and which is being validated by early clients but requires an impact-sourced capital boost from organizations such as MIT before looking for private capital. The more growth we have the more impact we have, and with DignifAI we will be giving these communities the tools to open up new options to exit the poverty cycle in a dignifying setting.

DignifAI’s mission is to be a springboard for Labor Inclusion of the most vulnerable communities affected by the migration crisis in Latin America. We think of the millions of Venezuelan migrants spread across the region, but also of their host communities who have also face poverty, unemployment, and social instability for years. DignifAI is an Impact Sourcing operation that looks to elevate the gig-economy and labor market inclusion rates. We are investing to create a dual-education program that includes new income-generating and upskilling opportunities, and are leveraging our AI Data-labeling business as the sustainable motor of this social impact operation.

DignifAI is an early-stage startup that is building and testing its business model. We have already completed several client projects in Brazil and Colombia in both remote and in-person project formats, and with these experiences, we have transitioned from pilot-stage to seed-growth stage. We have delivered projects to international clients in the industries of AgriTech, Academic, E-commerce, Health, and Software Development –including multiple US Universities, a Danish University, a Brazilian AI company, and technology companies in the US. With these clients, we have successfully labeled and delivered over 340,000 Micro-units with 47 workers in Cucuta, Colombia, and Boa Vista, Brazil. Having said this, our project pipeline is still very young, and our business development is still conducting hypothesis testing and customer discovery initiatives to polish our value proposition and product-market fit to solidify our impact-generating growth.

1. Impact Sourcing: While there are several Impact Sourcing operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; we have yet to encounter a home-grown operation in South America. Being in the same hemisphere as our primary client market, we offer attractive nearshore project management and cost-based value for clients in the Americas.

2. AI Industry: Machine Learning data-labeling is the focus of our Impact Sourcing operation because of its significant growth opportunity. The ML annotation TAM is expected to grow to $7B by 2027 and the Latin American market is set to grow annually by an amount equal to 1% regional GDP between 2020-2035. This scale of market growth allows us to ride this high growth to leverage our impact opportunity.

3. Differentiation: Our unique service offering is working on Spanish and Portuguese data-labeling projects in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field, which is a subsegment of the AI field that is growing at 35% CAGR and represents a US$800M+ SAM on its own by 2027. This language-AI focus gives us a window to become subject matter leaders while we compete with other established Impact Sourcing providers in the language-agnostic image-labeling field. 

4. Social Venture: The lack of an efficient response to the migration crisis from the public institutions, especially with the arrival of Covid-19, compels us to take action. We want to spark the conversation that the private sector must play a leading role and help change the narrative that the private sector only flourishes in pure market-driven environments.

Our Impact legacy is defined by two sets of numbers, the first is how many people DignifAI will serve with our solution; the second is what percentage of our served community will obtain gig or labor market integration with the skills they developed with us on a 4 months rolling basis.

By Q2, 2021 DignifAI has served 47 individuals, including 38 women, 9 men, and 1 LGBTQ. 50% of them have been invited to repeat projects because of their excellent performance and willingness.

By Q2, 2022 our goal is to have served 250x individuals; with 70% of the beneficiaries being in Colombia from the network of our partner NGO Comparte por Una Vida Colombia, and 30% being in Brazil from the network of our partner NGO Refugio 343. Our goal is to maintain a 50:50 ratio of migrant (Venezuelan) and host individuals (Colombians and Brazilians, respectively).

By 2026, our goal is to be operating in two more countries that have been significantly impacted by the migration crisis, Panama and Ecuador, where we have strong ties to the social-venture ecosystem. At this point, our goal is to have served 2,500 unique beneficiaries with a 50% post-experience integration rate into the local economy and 75% generating complimentary income through the gig economy. With this impact, we will also be impacting up to 10,000 indirect beneficiaries given the average family size of 4x that our communities have.

DignifAI manages a Balanced Scorecard with five areas – each one with three objectives and monthly metrics. This is the balance scorecard that oversees our startup evolution and is designed with the objective of fundraising a pre-seed investor round (see fundraising question below).

1)  Customers

-     Improve Client. Outreach > # client-lead meetings

-     Improve Value Proposition > Lead Conversion Rate

-     Improve Activation Rate > Client Conversion Rate

2)  Financial

-     Consolidate Pricing Level > Maintaining target Gross Margins

-     Protect Burn-Rate > Maintaining lean operational model

-     Focus Project Size > Target Revenue & Worker requirements per project

3)  Operational

-     Proposal turnaround time > # information intake meeting for proposal

-     Project Deployment stage > # days after contract signing

-     Client Satisfaction > CPI Survey post-project

4)  Culture

-     External Job Interest > # opening requests to work at DignifAI

-     Networking > # webinars/ events participation

-     Employee Cross-Training > Educational content or responsibility-rotation

5a) Impact (Short-term)

-     Income generation per beneficiary with DignifAI (USD)

-     Ratio of wages earned/local minimum wage of participants

-     Ratio of Migrant and Host beneficiaries.

5b) Impact (Long-term)

-     % rate of annotator-beneficiaries generating complementary part-time income through Gig-economy.

-     % rate of annotator-beneficiaries that formally integrate into the local job market.

Full-time staff: 02

• Managing Partner
• Project Manager

Part-time staff: 05

• Project Supervisor – Colombia (0.5-1 FTE)
• Project Supervisor – Brazil (0.5-1 FTE)
• Data-Scientist (0.25-0.5 FTE)
• Contractor: Data-Labeling Strategy Consultant (0.25 FTE) 
• Business Development Intern

Leadership:

• Laura Oller, Co-founder of DignifAI, has ten years of experience working in the World Bank and IFC, which has uniquely positioned her to understand these vulnerable populations. She is responsible for developing our impact goals and traction.
• Enrique Jose Garcia, our Managing Partner, comes from an entrepreneurial background and is responsible for the day-to-day management of DignifAI. Before DignifAI, Enrique worked as a journalist on the Colombian-Venezuelan border while completing his master's at LSE. Being a Cuban-Venezuelan migrant himself, Enrique also has an emotional commitment to this crisis.

Team

• Dana Garcia: Our Project Manager is a Venezuelan migrant who has a Microbiology research background. She has worked extensively in managing Big-Data QC/QA protocols and implementing quantitative project management structures.
• Daniela De Santiago and Henrique Sanchez: Our Project Supervisors who live in the border regions of Cucuta and Boa Vista, respectively. Daniela is a Venezuelan migrant who comes from a linguistics background which helps her in the NLP training and supervisory role, and Henrique has experience working with the UN on G.B.V projects.
• Lisa Reiners: Our in-house Data Scientist is a Venezuelan Migrant who has worked for multiple International Cooperation agencies in Colombia. She works with clients to define our deliverable KPI’s and problem-solving around model training. 
• Brett Carpenter: Our Data-Labeling Strategy Consultant with six years of experience working in the US Tech sector and hiring data-labeling agencies such as DignifAI. His perspective of client Data-labeling pain points helps DignifAI become a more professional and scalable operation.

Our commitment to these values begins with our leadership team, which is composed of a female co-founder, Laura Oller, and a male Managing Partner, Enrique Jose Garcia. Together, this leadership team has created a socially conscious operational team that is composed of four Venezuelan migrant women, and one Brazilian man, all equally committed to the impact-mission of DignifAI through their personal connection to the migration crisis.

For our worker base, one of our core missions is to maintain a 50:50% ratio between migrant and host beneficiaries as a way of promoting social integration and minimizing the xenophobia flame that is growing in both countries in response to the migration crisis. While we maintain our opportunities open to all gender identifications, our beneficiary pool has so far been represented by over 80% female and 2% LGBTQ, with the remaining being male. This tendency has demonstrated the female initiative to become financially independent and family providers in these communities.

One of our fundamental advantages over many other initiatives is that we maintain an active presence in Cucuta and Boa Vista, allowing us to maintain an inclusive culture between our team and our beneficiary community. In both locations we have operational team members that live in the very same border communities where we recruit our workers from, allowing us to understand firsthand their concerns, challenges, ambitions, and frustrations and take these into consideration when making decisions and developing strategies.

At DignifAI, we are applying to the Digital Inclusion Challenge because our core social values align with it, and we know our solution can help address some of the biggest problems in Latin America: forced migration, internal displacement, unemployment, and inequality, all through decent work and employment integration. We believe winning this challenge will help us accelerate our operations in both Colombia and Brazil, and take us a step closer to extending our reach to the rest of the region. Some of the barriers we will be able to overcome by winning this challenge are:

• Investment in computers and internet connection for our workers, to continue scaling our hybrid remote and in-person projects in Colombia and Brazil.
• Expert mentorship on NLP development to identify evolving trends that can help DignifAI grow.
• Accessible legal advice on how to deal with legal regulations of sensitive data and the complexities of international contracts.
• Networking with gig-economy marketplaces, such as UpWork and Fiverr, to develop vocational training content on using their platforms and adjusting it to the Latin American market.
• Networking with EdTech content providers to keep developing the digital literacy and upskilling content of our Dual-Education program.
• Networking with market-leading AI companies who are developing NLP models for the US-Hispanic market to grow our client base.

1. Business Model: While we believe there is long-term growth to be maximized in the data-labeling market, we want to invest in the development of different levels of AI-training-related services. Latin America is still very behind in AI R&D and deployment, and our goal is to become a regional incubator of AI solutions around Spanish and Portuguese NLP. We want to follow the steps of the BPO industry and have cross-cutting services (our core “supervised” data-labeling services) as well as create an incubation/accelerator model to promote regional innovation that can then feed our impact workload. We, therefore, want to connect with experts in the NLP space to develop local content, events, and podcasts on this field, and begin developing that ecosystem.
2. Service Distribution: One of our core verticals with the Spanish and Portuguese NLP strategy is to become the “Spanish speaking data-labeling arm” of NLP developers in the US. Because the US is the fourth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, with a Hispanic population of over 60m+, we believe there is a growing need for NLP developers to replicate existing products with Spanish-language capacity. Specifically, we want to meet NLP developers in the fields of Health (EHR records and telemedicine), chatbot providers, social-media analysts, and e-commerce platform developers – all of these fields will require Spanish-based NLP functionality.

By looking at your list of winners from last year, we would love to partner with:

• Tamo Junto: We think it is necessary to educate and train our workers to grow professionally in the fields of their interest, of which many are interested in being entrepreneurs. We believe that Tamo Junto can be a valuable impact partner to help us provide our Brazilian workers with a constructive learning platform for entrepreneurship as a complement to our gig-economy and local labor market curricula.
• Nucleus – Utiva: Since this team is working to bridge the digital gaps in Africa, we believe they would be a great mentor for us in terms of education and digital skills development, allowing us to learn about their business model and the definition of their educational programs. 
• D2: Dignity and Data could be an incredible software partner for us to learn from their platform and apply it to some of our data collection projects, giving our workers a chance to work from their mobile devices. This would add an additional layer to the scalability of the remote projects we operate.

The Venezuelan exodus is expected to reach 10M people by 2023, of which 6M will be residing in Latin America. Today, the Venezuelan migrant population has reached almost 2 million in Colombia, and 253,500 in Brazil. Venezuelan migrants have become one of the most vulnerable sub-segments of the regions’ BoP population, along with their already impoverished host communities. DignifAI’s social impact mission is to help these people integrate into the formal economies of their host countries through the development of their digital skills and the democratization of gig-economy opportunities. 

Winning The Andan Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion could help us accelerate our operations in the border regions of Cucuta, Colombia, and Boa Vista, Brazil - two of the regions most affected by this crisis - by providing adequate equipment, safe spaces, and better work conditions for our teams of workers. By improving our work and communications infrastructure, we will be able to get more refugees and IDPs to participate in our platform while we continue to grow our pipeline of work.

At DignifAI, we invest in training people to develop their digital skills through AI micro-work. We are looking to democratize this type of work through a dual-education program that includes both temporary work and vocational training. Our impact mission is to be a springboard of labor inclusion for vulnerable populations who are looking for new opportunities to integrate into the formal and gig-economy markets of their region. This allows them to grow professionally and improve their livelihoods.

Winning the HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity would help us invest in developing the educational content we need to build our upskilling curriculum. Our dual-education model aims to provide, not only digital skills development tools, but vocational training to help our beneficiaries integrate into the digital economy through alliances and partnerships with content developers and EdTech experts.

At DignifAI, we understand that women are often the most vulnerable demographic of the mass migration crisis, being forced into illicit rings of prostitution, trafficking, and violence. According to the Girls on the Move Report, published in 2020, Venezuelan migrant women and girls are particularly vulnerable to different kinds of gender-based violence both during their travel and once they reach their destination.

Women in the Colombian-Venezuelan border are facing these challenges, not only because of the migration crisis but also because of the presence of Colombian drug cartels and armed groups, which have been operating in the region for decades and have taken advantage of the crisis to grow their trafficking and illicit activities. Our gender focus is equally important in Brazil, where we work in the state with the highest rates of gender-based violence in the country (Roraima, with 2.3 femicides per 100,000 female inhabitants in 2019). It is because of these contexts that DignifAI has recruited a majority of women to its operation, with more than 80% of our initial 47 workers being women. 

Winning the Innovation for Women Prize would allow us to continue offering young women the opportunities to develop their skills and generate a dignified income in both a remote structure, which can adjust to their family obligations, or a safe environment when conducting in-house projects.

Our mission is to promote and enable the social and economical integration of the vulnerable populations of the Venezuelan migration crisis through Artificial Intelligence. DignifAI offers data-labeling services for companies and organizations that require supervised training of unstructured data for their Computer Vision and NLP models. By outsourcing these AI microwork projects, we intend to be a springboard of digital inclusion, helping our workers to develop their basic computational skills, and allowing them to integrate into the labor market.

Our main focus thus far has been Computer Vision and NLP projects. Today, we have successfully labeled and delivered over 340,000 Micro-units with 47 workers in Cucuta, Colombia, and Boa Vista, Brazil. With this initial traction we have offered our workers digital upskilling and softskill training through as well as allowed them to earn a dignified wage for their work. 100% of our participants have either been unemployed or informally employed for three months before being invited to DignifAI - and most have remained stagnant in these border regions without being able to access the labor markets of central-urban regions. 

Winning the AI for Humanity Prize would be a great boost to grow our operations in both Colombia and Brazil, by investing in technological infrastructure, human resources, and software alliances to improve our data-labeling services. This will allow us to expand our client base and get more projects, which will translate into more work opportunities for our beneficiary communities. For us, the bigger the growth, the bigger the impact.

At DignifAI, we are committed to the social and economic integration of the most vulnerable communities affected by the Venezuelan migration crisis. Venezuelan border regions like Boa Vista and Cucuta have been facing structural problems such as poverty, hunger, unemployment, and violence for decades. We believe that the private sector can be of great help to finally start democratizing work opportunities through innovative solutions. 

In order to achieve this, we offer AI data-labeling services to companies who need to outsource these low-complexity tasks. By doing this, we help our workers develop their basic digital skills through AI microwork, and we provide them with vocational training to insert them into the digital gig-economy after they graduate from our dual-education program. 

The main purpose of our activities is to provide our workers with a safe space and temporal work opportunities to earn a dignified wage. We also give them the necessary tools to actively participate in both the local and digital economy, increasing their chances of breaking their poverty cycle.

Winning the GSR Prize can help us boost our operations in both Colombia and Brazil, by allowing us to invest in educational content for our dual educational program, invest in technological infrastructure for both our in-situ and remote projects, and consolidate software alliances to improve our data-labeling services. Our aim is to expand our client base and get more active projects, so we can create more opportunities for our communities.