The Internet is a powerful thing, and it can bring about connections in places we once never imagined. Providing an oddly tangible way of interacting with someone on the other side of the world has presented a wealth of business opportunities, largely democratizing a large portion of our corporate and small business culture on a global scale.
Samasource is a company that utilizes the Internet to bring job opportunities to marginalized individuals, including refugees. Its new Refugee Work Program, created in conjunction with CrowdFlower, aims to bring these opportunities to people through its new iPhone application.
The new iPhone app is called Give Work, and it leverages its crowdsourcing technology to connect users with refugees in search of a job. Give Work is designed specifically for refugees at one of the world’s largest refugee sites, at the Dadaab, Kenya data center.
The idea behind Samasource’s company is to aid in computer training and helping refugees land technology-based work. Job skills plus opportunities can enable an individual to better sustain their own livelihood, which can be difficult to maintain at times when you are a refugee.
In matching the two aspects of the job world, Samasource’s new iPhone app allows clients to list a host of quick and easy tasks from CrowdFlower customers, which are completed by the end users of the application. The tasks translate into real work for the company, and real pay for the refugees. Tasks could be the creation of keywords for images or video clips, or classifying text.
These are aspects of web data organization that have typically been reserved for users of a given site. However, not all companies seeking this type of information has the desire or resources to create their own application or website in order to render such massive amounts of user activity.
For participating companies, they are able to give back to refugee camps with the donation of their time instead of money. It is an interesting coupling of business and community service, ultimately benefiting more than just a commercially interested entity. In extending the digital economy to members of a refugee site, an exchange of knowledge and resources becomes a socially aware byproduct of attempting to do the right thing. If you would like to learn more about Samasource and its new iPhone app with CrowdFlower, click here.