Paul is a 24-year-old refugee from South Sudan who lives in Dadaab, Kenya. He walked to the Kakuma refugee camp at age nine and was denied formal employment. Through the Refugee Work Program, he recently learned how to use a computer and is now earning money doing computer-based work through Samasource. Samasource provides decent jobs for refugees, women, and youth in developing areas by connecting them with data entry, image tagging, and other basic technology tasks that can pay over 10 times the average local wage.
2. Paul’s Story
Paul Parach
Dadaab, Kenya
Refugee Work Program
24 years old, born in South Sudan
Walked to Kakuma refugee camp at
age nine
Denied formal employment
Learned how to use a computer
one month ago
Earning money with Samasource
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3. Wasted talent is one of poverty’s greatest ills.
1 billion youth will face 50% unemployment in the next decade
60% of the world’s working poor are women
Computer-based work provides decent jobs.
Basic technology tasks like data entry and image tagging can pay up to $5 an
hour, over 10 times the average wage in low-income regions
Samasource brings work to women, youth, and
refugees to lift them out of poverty.
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4. The Consequence of Inaction
“I joined the militia because I thought I could get paid after the war. I knew I was
risking my life but I had no other choice. My mother was finding it hard to feed us. I
joined to have a job.”
Sylvestre, 18, Congo-Brazzaville.
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6. Services and Clients
research data entry and website app testing
assistance digitization packages
image content
moderation updating
virtual video
assistance captioning
Current + Former Clients
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7. Our Impact
• 18 partners, 500+ people served in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan and
Uganda since September 2008
• $160,000+ in work for our partners since September 2008
• 300 people trained in application development, project management, and customer
service since March 2008
• Partnerships with Inveneo and Cisco to expand in East Africa
• Winner, Facebook Fund REV, Stanford Social Enterprise Challenge, Business in
Development Challenge
Press Coverage
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8. Our Impact: Maria’s Story
Maria
Islamabad, Pakistan
Founder, Women’s Digital League
"For me and other women in Pakistan, Samasource is
our own ray of light, our way of escaping the
claustrophobic environment surrounding us."
Cannot work outside her home
Master’s Degree in English
Before Samasource: <$200/month
After Samasource: $850+/month, 3 employees
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9. Our Team
Leila Chirayath Janah Jess McCarter
Founder and CEO VP of Sales
Former Visiting Scholar, Stanford University Founder. Sagebit
Consultant, Katzenbach Partners Founder, RideBit
World Bank Development Research Group
Consultant, aSmallWorld.net
BA, Harvard University (African
BA, Dartmouth University
Development Studies)
Expertise: Start-ups, 10 years in software
Expertise: Remote work, social
sales and development
enterprise, development
Alex Onsager Kate Brennan
Marketing and Sales MBA Intern
Tech Lead
Investment Banking, JPMorgan
Developer, Send Hotness and Graffiti
Private Equity, Shamrock Capital Advisors
(leading Facebook applications)
BBA & BA, University of Iowa
Co-founder, Demigo
pursuing MBA, Stanford Graduate School of
BS, Stanford
Business
Expertise: Web application
Expertise: Media, entertainment and
development, product management
technology investing
Advisory Board
Ken Banks Darren Berkowitz Katherine Barr Bruce Cahan
CEO, Frontline SMS Founder & CEO, DoMyStuff.com Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures Founder, Urban Logic
Mohamoud Jibrell Robert Hockett Premal Shah Emeka Okafor
CIO, Ford Foundation Professor, Cornell Law School President, Kiva.org Director, TED Global
Melissa Lau Joy Sun
Associate, Revolution Ventures Director, Clinton Foundation
HIV/AIDS Initiative
10. How you can help
We need to raise $50K in the next two months to keep
operating.
Please donate, tell your friends, or give us work.
www.samasource.org
twitter.com/samasource
leila@samasource.org
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Editor's Notes
Paul Parach, 24, was born in a small village in South Sudan. At the age of ten, he was forced to leave his mother and four sisters in order to escape Sudan&#x2019;s escalating civil war. He fled to Kenya in 1994. After weeks of walking across the country with other young boys in a similar situation, he arrived at the Kenyan border and then at Kakuma refugee camp.
At the camp, &#x201C;life became harrowing &#x2026; because we had no parent[s].&#x201D; There, Paul was shot in the right side of his stomach by a man from a rival tribe, and moved to the ICU in Nairobi. His leg was paralyzed. &#x201C;[I was left with] a disability at the age of fourteen.&#x201D;
But Paul kept going. The UNHCR transfered him to Dadaab's Ifo camp in 1994. At first, Paul explains, &#x201C;Life seemed to grow harder every day&#x201D; because he had left home without his parents and without any education. Since then, however, he has learned English and made his way to secondary school. He's among only a handful of Dinka (people from South Sudan) in Dadaab&#x2014;almost all of the 280,000 people there are Somali.
Two weeks ago, I met Paul in Dadaab at a computer lab run by CARE International. I was there to run an experiment: could we get refugees to use computers to do work for a San Francisco company?
Paul had touched a computer for the first time only a month before. But within the first hour of our training, Paul had learned how to use email and Google. By the next day, he was teaching his classmates how to complete the work we found for him to do.
Paul is in our first class of refugee remote workers in Dadaab, doing work based on Amazon&#x2019;s Mechanical Turk marketplace. Earning money in this way may be his only shot at putting himself through school.
Here&#x2019;s our premise.
1 billion youth will enter the job market
42 million refugees with no opportunities for advancement
In our first six months, we identified 8 core service lines that are easily repeatable, lower-risk, and generally suited for our partners.
One project that we&#x2019;re proud of is our work with Benetech, a nonprofit in Palo Alto digitizing 100,000 books for blind readers. Our partner in Nairobi proofreads Benetech&#x2019;s OCRed text files to achieve nearly 100% accuracy. We&#x2019;ve also explored unique services such as Facebook application testing and basic website creation -- another client, recent CNN hero Rising Tide Capital, decided to use Samasource to help low-income microentrepreneurs in Jersey City build inexpensive websites. Our model is a win for clients, AND a win for workers.
Samasource derives its name from the Sanskrit word sama, which means &#x201C;equal&#x201D;. We empower the world's untapped talent - from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan - to deliver quality internet-based services, such as data entry and basic programming.
Our model consists of three steps. First, we screen and select partners who employ local people to provide services, relying on stringent social impact and quality criteria that verify our partners' technical abilities and commitment to social responsibility. All of our partners are located in the poorest regions of the world, but have access to basic computing infrastructure.
Next, we provide our partners with service-specific training and prepare them to further train their own staff using live sample projects and web-based tools. Finally, we market our partners' services to paying clients through a website and sales team based in San Francisco.
Samasource is a 501(c)(3) non-profit social business. Our management team and global advisory board have over forty years of experience working in technology, remote work, and social and economic development for leading institutions such as the Clinton Foundation, Kiva.org, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. Thus far, with an investment of only $35,000 from donors and an all-volunteer staff, Samasource has found more than $160,000 in projects for 13 small businesses, nonprofit training centers, and rural data centers that provide dignified jobs to more than 500 marginalized individuals in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Pakistan.