Sama Impact Digital Literacy and Online Work Hubs

Sama Impact Solutions is a program of Samasource a pioneer in digitally enabled work that opens up employment opportunities from non-traditional sources and bringing youth and women from areas of high unemployment into the global economy through digital work. We have successfully implemented a grounds-up approach in creating ecosystems through which young people can thrive in the digital economy.  Samasource creates new pathways to dignified work that pay sustainable, living wages. Our poverty alleviation model is predicated on the theory that exposure to formal work and fair pay can be transformative for the disadvantaged. Through our baselining we aggregate impact indicators such as current income, access to savings (if any), work experience, level of education to ensure we are reaching the most underserved.  We introduce students to the digital economy, having gained not only ICT, but 21st century aligned skills that allow them to compete in global labour markets.

 Across the globe, 197 million people are unemployed, and another 1.5 billion are vulnerably employed: working in menial, informal and poorly paying positions without security or safety. According to the World Bank, over 3 billion people live on an income of less than $1.50 per day. . Changes in the climate are exacerbating the challenges that those living in poverty face as they are displaced from their communities, further compounded by arising local conflicts for resources. This has seen major trends across sub-saharan Africa of people living as refugees and Internally Displaced People.  Further removing them from their local community safety nets, traditional forms of employment and access to services such as education and health.

Sub-Saharan Africa in particular has one of the youngest population in the world and the continent’s youth population (aged 15-24) is expected to more than double to over 830 million by 2030.  Globally, and especially across Africa, young people are leaving secondary and higher education without market aligned skills. Economic growth across Africa is not adequately absorbing the unemployed and for the available jobs a majority of youth are not job ready. In addition, globally the nature and future of work is radically changing.

Samasource works with low opportunity but high potential individuals characterised by:

1.   Lack of knowledge about and access to jobs/freelance work in the global gig economy.

2.  Lack of an understanding, access and take up of relevant support systems to work effectively as a digital freelance, such as health insurance and savings.

3.  Limited access to equipment to work in the gig economy. While the infrastructure and technology are available in (most parts of) Sub-Saharan Africa, the initial investment costs for laptops and internet access is too high for the Sub-Saharan youth.

We address this by taking a market systems approach to understanding the barriers and support functions that are required for young people to be successful as gig workers and they are at the center of designing those solutions.We achieve this by co-creating our solutions with the people that we serve. We have an iterative approach to designing curriculum and job inter mediation initiatives. We primarily focus on the cross cutting issues that impact on our target groups’ ability to learn, connect to jobs and find meaningful opportunities.

Samasource is a pioneer in the field of Digital work, having employed 10,000 people since its inception in 2008 and as a result impacted upon the lives of 50,000 in four geographies. We have experience of working with over 100 Fortune 500 companies and start ups to provide managed data services.  Our workforce development program in Kenya has trained over 3,000 young people with a placement rate of over 60% after completion of our training curricula. We have a highly dynamic iterative approach to developing workforce development programs that are market aligned. In 2016 we pivoted and piloted a co-shared working space/hub in Nairobi where young people are being supported with training, infrastructure, job matching support to become independent freelancers and plug into the digital economy.  Through this hub we were able to understand what is required for a grounds-up approach to building ecosystems in places of high unemployment, which can enable young people to thrive in the digital economy and have access to a growing global demand for talent. Through our longitudinal impact measurement system we have gained in-depth insights into the effects of various forms of employment in the digital economy. For example, we consistently found that freelance work offers higher incomes than traditional job employment.  From our pilots, we learnt key drivers to success in the digital economy and how to address key barriers to entry. We have implemented and successfully tested the same approach in other geographies including Jordan, Northern Kenya with Somali Refugees, Lebanon allowing us to verify the adaptability of the program. Leveraging on 10 years experience and the work that we done over the past three years getting young people in the freelance and digital economy we intend to transfer our learnings and experience onto a Learning Platform that will support young people across East Africa with digital skills and job matching support for online work platforms for even faster transformation of a worker’s skills from the informal economy into a living-wage job.  

Our approach is specifically tailored to address four primary contributors to unemployment: Lack of in-demand skills, Lack of an understanding of job-search process,  Lack of connections to employers and access to equipment as well as other support systems. 

Refugees are often exclusively characterised as vulnerable yet they are among the most  resilient of our society and so are some of the most talented youth and women who are born into poverty and conflict. At Samasource we recognize that talent is equally distributed  but opportunity is not! What we are doing is leverage on technology to bring into the global economy people that would have traditionally been excluded from the labour market. We are doing this by

• Building youth’s capacity on 21st century digital technologies, such as AI and machine learning, that are perceived as exclusively for the highly educated, thereby providing access to new (job) markets

• Preparing the youth for the needs of employers in the digital economy (freelancing) 

• Providing cutting edge technology that allows scaled up training

We connect marginalized yet talented women and youth to dignified work via the internet. We pioneered a new model of employment called Impact Sourcing, which introduces business process outsourcing as a means to reduce poverty by providing work that pays a sustainable, living wage in places with high rates of unemployment including slums and rural communities in East Africa, South Asia, and the Americas. We further pivoted to support young people access the digital economy through work platforms such as UpWork which allows work to be done from anywhere in the world. We have connected a diverse group of young people to non traditional forms of work such as refugees in Northern Kenya, Lebanon, Jordan or people living in secondary cities such as Gulu in Northern Uganda. Leveraging on 10 years experience and the work that we have done over the past three years getting young people in the freelance and digital economy we intend to transfer our learnings and experience onto a Learning Experience Platform that will support young people across East Africa with digital skills and job matching support for online work platforms

• With over 10,000 young people employed since our inception in 2008 and 50,000 impacted we have proved that digital work can lift people out of poverty. Our impact studies show that pre Samasource on average people are earning below the poverty line and soon after securing a job they are able to stabilize their immediate term needs such as housing, better nutrition and access to healthcare and will increase their earnings by 4x in 3 years. Since our pivot to supporting young people become freelancers we took a deliberate approach to invest in time and facilities to understand what the barriers to entry into the digital economy are and what supporting functions we could provide were in terms of information, skills, technology and other related services are. Through our pilot programs in Dadaab Refugee Camp, Nairobi , Lebanon and Urban refugees we have seen that over 40% of those trained and given the appropriate support will go on to find a job online, complete it and get paid. We are at the later stages of a Randomized Control Trial of our work but below are some links to our impact score cards and third party evaluations of our work

https://www.samasource.com/our-impact

https://www.iaop.org/Content/19/165/4856/Default.aspx

https://www.impactm.org/impact-audits/

1. Samasource currently directly employs 2400 plus agents across 4 geographies and expects to indirectly impact on a further 6000 ( every employee has approximately 3.2 depends their income impacts)
2. Through the expansion of our freelance program into Tanzania ( 1000 reached) and plus an addition to our workforce we expect on current resources we will impact on approximately 5000 people directly next year.
3. However with the launch of our Online Learning Experience platform we expect to significantly increase the numbers of those reached in the next 2 years reaching a total of 25,000 between 2020 and 2021 as we test and launch the platform and open it up to partners
4. In 2022 and 2023 we expected this to dramatically increase as we open up our platform to Universities across Sub Saharan Africa, Vocational Partners and Other tertiary institutions meaning that in 5 years we expect to have reached up to half a million.

Our solutions is tailored to address four primary contributors to unemployment: Lack of in-demand skills, Lack of an understanding of job-search process,  Lack of connections to employers and access to equipment as well as other support systems. Our product roadmap includes moving our curriculum to an automated and customized platform that enables personalized and self paced learning, for even faster transformation of a worker’s skills 

. Our goals  focuses on two aspects:  

1. Access to new job markets/opportunities, our associated programs have shown that within a year of working with Samasouce our employees double their income. In three years they increase their earnings by 4.3x. By leveraging on this experience we are scaling our impact by expanding into the global gig economy.

2. Job (type) diversification: We teach our students to adapt to the needs of employers in the 21st century digital economy (gig economy) by training them to become digital freelancers. Our core baseline, exit and follow exit surveys preliminary results show that on average after receiving our training and support to become freelancers graduates go on to earn an average of USD 187 per month compared to those that opted for traditional employment who earned an average of USD 170 per month

1. Low/no uptake on the supply side: The unemployed youth from Dar and Tanga may not be interested and/or willing to take up the provided curriculum due to lack of awareness and peer pressure from the community to seek traditional forms of employment.

2. Low/no adoption: Enrolled students may not adopt the training provided due to cognitive limitations, bad perception of the teachers, peer pressure from other students and non-students.

3. Little/no demand: There may be little to no demand for the trained workers and digital services from national and/or international firms due to lack of awareness and bad perceptions about the skill and capacity level of the Tanzanian workforce.

4. Internet/electricity connectivity: Both internet and electricity disruptions may negatively affect the implementation of the online curricular.

1. Advertising and recruitment: We will actively advertise and promote our training courses 

2. Samasource has experience  in dealing with cross cutting issues that affect student attendance of classes and adoption of new initiatives.

3.  Courses are deliberately designed to be compact and flexible in their timing to ensure that other cross cutting issues do not become a barrier to learning.

4.  Over the past decade, Samasource has established a network of high-level international clients. We will use our existing network to promote the newly trained workforce. 

5. We will ensure that there is an offline version of the entire curriculum available as well as set up our training centres in areas that are backed by electrical generators. 

Sama Impact Solutions is an initiative of Samasource that supports youth, women, other organisations and governmental bodies to set up ecosystems that enable young people to access digital jobs.

Core Team: 15 ( program management and training)

Support team: The core team has access to diverse teams of Engineering, Product Management, Project Teams, Sales and Business Development across the Samasource Group 

Samasource is led by Leila Janah, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a former Director of CARE USA, a TechFellow, recipient of the inaugural Club de Madrid Young Leadership Award, and the youngest person to win a Heinz Award in 2014. She was named one of Fortune’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs and was the subject of cover stories in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Conscious Company Magazines. The solution is led by Bennett Grassano with a background as a Tech Entrepreneur, Web Developer, Community Leader, Fundraiser, and Business Developer at leading Social Enterprises. Recently as  Vice President of Strategic Development at Kiva Bennett designed and capitalized new initiatives for Kiva. He is a co-founder of Kiva Labs, a program to accelerate product innovation among social enterprises. Under them is a multinational team of seasoned professionals from across the globe with localised knowledge and a strong track record of delivering impact and working with the underserved.

The solution is currently being delivered at a number of Diverse geographies at different stages with a number of partners.

Jordan: Partnered with the Tent Foundation to explore the possibilities of sending outsourced work to refugees in Jordan.

Ethiopia: Launching a co shared working space with a Private Capital organisation to support young Ethiopians into the digital Economy

Tanzania: Working with a Swiss Foundation to set up Freelancing Hubs in Dar Es Salaam and Tanga to support young people into the digital economy.

Currently the project is funded through a combination of Earned Revenue ( other organisations paying us for advisory services as explained in our partnerships) and grants. We will seek to achieve sustainability through creating eco-systems were young people can be aware of the opportunities that exist in the digital economy  and are also adequately supported. The growth in smart mobile phone use and ever improving connectivity means more young people can be integrated into the global economy. With clear pathways to employment and opportunities to earn an income, the project will become sustainable by asking students to pay for their learning. Through advances in technology in mobile learning we expect the cost of training per student to be very low thereby sustaining a paid for model.  We are also exploring a sign posting system where graduates will be directed to micro finance institutions and possible hardware providers to solve for lack of access to equipment such as laptops.

The solution is designed to be sustainable in its approach. The hubs are designed not only for training, but will  provide spaces where work will actually be completed, thereby earning the centers some revenue. They will also be established as centers of excellence where they can sell services to other institutions/organisations creating another revenue stream. These projections are based on our own experience of establishing similar centers, especially in Nairobi. Our in-house Work Agency in Nairobi has generated over USD 200,000 in revenue over the past 21 months and is self-sustaining. We will also be investing in an automated  learning product for which we have already secured funding. The learning product will substantially reduce our costs of training as a result we will be able to offer online courses at affordable rates for those who have the capability to pay while they subsidize those that can't pay. 

While the money from this challenge will give us an opportunity to tangibly fund and scale our solution we also believe the networks that the Solve community will open will give us access to best practice and ideas to further improve our solution. We are currently working with a team of MIT Academics to implement an Randomized Control Trial for our core solution at Samasource, so this would be extending a partnership that already exists.

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We would like to partner with organisations that are working with undeserved communities to connect them to jobs. Especially those working on

1. Working on market systems approach to solving problems ( World Bank, AFDB and Governments)
2. Job Inter-mediation
3. Entry Level Skills providers

Samasource is the biggest Data Services provider in East Africa. 25% of the Fortune 500 trust Samasource to deliver turnkey, high-quality training data and validation for the world's leading AI technologies. From pilots to multi-year projects, Samasource securely trains and validates computer vision and NLP models. With over 10 years of experience and being pioneers in this field we believe there is more to be done to get more marginalized Youth and Women into the work place. While we are providing solutions for AI technologies we also recognize the potential for AI technology to support training and upskilling as we seek to scale and we will incorporate this into our Learning Experience platform that will support automated  and self paced training.

In Sub Saharan Africa young people are leaving secondary and higher education without market aligned skills and STEM education and awareness to opportunities is lacking. Economic growth across Africa is not adequately absorbing the unemployed and for the available jobs a majority of youth are not job ready. One key component of helping young people to understand the nature of changing work and the future of work will be the exposure to digital literacy and different applications of technology to help them adapt to the radical changes in the global labor market. Samasource would use this Prize to promote more awareness and access to digital literacy to secondary and tertiary students to help them be market ready for the changing job market.

Samasource is already deliberately focussed on women and girls in its programs evidenced by over 50% of its impact workforce being female. If we got this funding we would deploy it to solve for the cross cutting issues that impact on women and girls to find meaningful and dignified work and would implement courses and training programs that specifically address those challenges. This would involve consolidating the success that we have already achieved in helping women into work in Kenya and sharing best practice across East and  the greater Sub Saharan Africa.

This initiative and solution was originally born out of the need to support communities that are excluded from local labor markets due to a number of issues including being refugees or internally displaced people. If selected for this prize we would extend our work that we are doing in Jordan, Kenya and Tanzania to support more refugees into the labor force.

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Some of the challenges within the market system for Digital work space is a lack of information or real testimonies that would encourage young people to choose Digital work as a career or on the other end the stories that exist are of those that have been exploited.  This prize would support us to build a network of alumni that would be able to give people support on how to be successful freelancers but more importantly to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.

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