Samasource: Help Yourself By Helping Others

What if by investing in your own business, you were improving the lives of marginalized individuals across the globe? In many refugee camps across developing nations, like ones in the image above, Samasource is giving impoverished individuals life-changing work - services needed by U.S. companies. Samasource has engineered a way for entrepreneurs in the U.S. to receive competitively-priced services while helping to alleviate global poverty where it's needed most. Microwork consisting of digital clerical tasks including data input, photo tagging, and translation, is completed by Samasource's Service Partners in impoverished nations, checked by volunteers in the U.S. via the GiveWork mobile app, and sold to companies and non-profits, many of them start-ups strapped for cash. Service Partners are payed for their work, volunteers feel good about themselves, and customers get their service rendered at a fair price point. Everyone wins. 

The process works like this: Samasource enlists its Service Partners, based on stringent criteria: the partners must demonstrate the ability to consistantly deliver high quality work and that their partnership with Samasource will bring meaningful economic development to their region. Often times this means finding small business owners and employees in some of the poorest communities in the world. Service Partners are then trained by Samasource using a combination of live examples and web tools. Through this training, Service Partners learn business tools that they can leverage to improve their situation in other ways.  

Last month after Haiti's emergency communication system was demolished, Samasource and Crowdflower leveraged their networks of people around the world who are fluent in Haitian-Creole to translate and prioritize emergency texts coming out of Haiti. To date, Samasource has worked with 18 small businesses, nonprofit training centers, and rural data centers, providing supplementary income to more than 500 individuals in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Pakistan.