Leila Chirayath Janah, Founder of Samasource & Lukas Biewald, Founder of CrowdFlower, On “GIVE WORK”, iPhone apps, & Refugees [VIDEO]

This is truly the hottest iPhone app ever! Samasource and CrowdFlower have teamed up to present Give Work, their new iPhone application. Give Work lets you support refugees in Dadaab, Kenya—the world’s largest refugee site—in minutes by completing short, on-screen tasks. In this video interview, Leila Chirayath Janah, Founder of Samasource, and Lukas Biewald, Founder of CrowdFlower, tell us about this innovative new iPhone app, explaining how it works, as well as why the two organizations decided to join forces to develop it.


To learn more also about the amazing work Samasource is doing to eradicate poverty worldwide, be sure to check out our previous video that also features Leila, Founder of Samasource. Thanks for watching – to stay abreast of upcoming videos that feature extraordinary people who are changing the world, be sure to subscribe and join us on Twitter @envisionGood.

The Full Transcript:

LEILA: Hi my name is Leila Janah. I’m the founder and CEO of Samasource. Samasource is a non-profit that connects women, youth, and refugees to computer-based work.

LUKAS: Hi, I’m Lukas of CrowdFlower. And we try to make it really frictionless for people to outsource repetitive tasks.

KATRINA: [Can you tell us about the CrowdFlower-Samasource partnership?

LUKAS: We started working with Samasource because they had lots of refugees that were highly educated and had really good internet connections, but didn't have any work to do. So it was kind of a perfect place for us to put our tasks because we spend a lot of time measuring accuracy and quality. And, we sent a couple test tasks to Samasource, having no idea how well refugees could do our tasks. And the results were really really promising and really exciting. They clearly took the task really seriously and did a good job.

There were certain tasks, like we work with a couple companies that want to measure the sentiment of their brands in social media and we were wondering like you know, is this a task that's too culturally sensitive, right? Like you know if someone says, "my android phone is awesome", could a refugee actually get the answer to that task? So, we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could have, like a second pass on that? Like if there are other people who could watch it a little bit. And that's what we do with a lot of these tasks: we have some people in the United States, and some people in the refugee camps doing the same task, and then matching them against each other.

We actually have an iPhone app now that's totally dedicated to that. And so, what happens is the refugees do some of these tasks, right. And people in the United States, on their iPhone, wait for the bus or whatever and do some of these small tasks, and we compare the answers. So, if they match then we can feel really confident that the answers are right. And if they don't match then we say, "well what's going on here?", and maybe we'll go back and in real time we'll tell the refugees you know, "hey, it seems like maybe this is the wrong answer." We think that's going to let them learn what the answers are that U.S. corporations are expecting.

We live in this amazing world where you know a company in Chicago has a real business problem that they want solved. They go to our website and it goes to this refugee camp in Kenya, it goes to somebody on their iPhone, actually to thousands of people hopefully on their iPhone waiting for the bus, that like all do the same task. Then the tasks all come together, our system figures out what the right answers are, filters out the small percentage of people who give the wrong answers, or whatever, and ships the data back to the customer. This all happens in hours. We're super excited about it.

LEILA: Micro-work is really the building block of the supply chains of the future.

Big companies are now virtualizing all this stuff that used to be manual. That used to happen on paper and used to be totally analog. And now that it's digital it can be parsed out and sent anywhere in the world and done by anyone, and kind of, collected together again, and stitched together and delivered to the client through automated processes. And I think that that is really exciting and it opens up the workforce to a whole set of people who were previously denied any kind of economic opportunity.

KATRINA: How many people in the refugee camp now have access to this kind of economic opportunity?

LEILA: So, we started with a small group of about 16 people, and we just got funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to scale that up to about 300. So, we're going to be training more people and bringing more people into the computer labs.

KATRINA: What are some of your current challenges?

LEILA: There are two sides to this. There's finding enough work, and there's finding enough workers. On the finding enough work side, I think the biggest challenge is convincing enterprises that they can rely on these digital supply chains, or whatever we're calling them, these automated systems we're relying on to get really high quality results that become the building block of their business. And I think that's slowly starting to happen. We're seeing more and more companies getting more and more comfortable with using these kinds of on-demand workforces.

And then, in terms of finding workers, that's never been a problem for us, and I don't think it will be a problem. And I think that technology really facilitates connections to people who otherwise would not be employable because they're in regions where traditional jobs aren't available. So, in many parts of Kenya, there's more than 70% unemployment because people can't get access to the sorts of jobs that we might have here. You know, it's really hard to get raw goods into certain areas, and it's really hard to get finished products out of those areas to export.

LEILA: Technology really obviates the need to have roads and other types of infrastructure.

Right, if you've got a satellite dish and some computers people can be doing work from wherever they might happen to be and they don't need to have this physical kind of engagement with the world to earn money.

KATRINA: Where can we find "Give Work" on the web?

LUKAS: CrowdFlower.com
LEILA: We're Samasource.org.
KATRINA: [Thank you Leila and Lukas !]

Leila Chirayath Janah, Founder of Samasource | Lukas Biewald, Founder of CrowdFlower

About: Samasource brings dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty. Website: www.samasource.org About: CrowdFlower makes it easy for companies to tap thousands of workers for short stretches and get quality work. Website: www.crowdflower.com

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