CHANGEMAKERS: Leila Chirayath Janah and Micro-work

[This is the first in an occasional series for Social Enterprise about young changemakers who are creating innovative new social businesses to tackle global problems at home and abroad.]

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, Leila Chirayath Janah, the daughter of Indian immigrants, had heard many stories about poverty in India but had never experienced it herself. So, at the age of 16, upon winning a college scholarship from a local tobacco company, she was able to convince its executives to let her use the money to travel to Ghana, instead. She wanted to learn more about the developing world, she told them.

Once in Ghana, Janah began teaching rural high school students. A volunteer teacher, Janah had 60 middle-school and high school students, and they had only three textbooks to share between them. By the time Janah left Ghana, she was buoyed by her students' ambition against adversity but she also kept "wondering how a country so rich in human capacity could be so poor."

It wasn't long before Janah got her answer: within weeks of returning home, she began receiving letters from her former students, asking her to send them money or such big-ticket items as a Nintendo Gameboy [or - in one letter - everything she owned], Janah said. "I was shocked," she told attendees at last week's TEDx conference in Silicon Valley. "These were the same students I'd seen in my classes, students with talent and ambition. What I realized is that they saw a greater opportunity in soliciting help from me than in earning their own money." This "culture of handouts," Janah said, has become, tragically, "a rational response to severely limited economic opportunities" in many developing countries.

The experience effected Janah profoundly.  She pursued a career in global development, graduating from Harvard in 2004 with a degree in African studies, then worked briefly at the World Bank and later, at Katzenbach Partners as an outsourcing consultant. But it wasn't until last year that Janah founded her own social business, a 501 (c)3 called Samasource - "sama" means "equal" in Sanskrit. The organization's mission is to bring micro-work - as opposed to micro-credit - to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty around the world.

Micro-work both revolutionizes and extends the notion of the assembly line into the 21st century. Micro-work - which Janah defines as small digital tasks such as tagging images to turning books into text files to selling real estate in Second Life - is work that can be performed on inexpensive computers and smart phones from anywhere by anyone.

"Henry Ford figured out a way to break down the making of an incredibly complex machine - the Model T - into small chunks that people with basic training could complete," Janah says. The assembly lines of the future, she says, will be all about organizing work digitally, with similar goals. "We now have the ability to use computers to help us break down complex processes and to insert human judgment where computers need help. The future is about humans and computers working together to get stuff done. Just like the opportunities that factory work provided to working class Americans in the last century, microwork will provide opportunities for marginalized people in this one."

One solar panel manufacturer, Janah says, already uses micro-work to generate sales leads this way. To create a roster of potential customers, the company uploads thousands of images of rooftops in San Francisco and asks digital workers to click a button if the rooftop has a visible panel. Another example is Maria, a woman in Pakistan who Janah says cannot work outside her home for cultural and childcare reasons. Maria has a master's degree in English; Samasource helped her to start earning $850 a month by linking her up with companies in the United States and elsewhere that needed small digital tasks completed. Earlier this year, Maria used her new-found income to start her own company called The Women's Digital League, in Pakistan, which employs three other women similarly homebound. "Micro-work taps the cloud," Janah says. "A large group of causal workers can use microwork to complete tasks worth a couple of cents each, which can add up to real money for people in need.

Janah says she believes micro-work is not only the future of work but also the future of outsourcing. Since launching a year ago, Samasource has so far convened 18 businesses - including Benetech, a low-income entrepreneur in Jersey City and a roster of mid-sized nonprofits— to provide jobs to more than 500 marginalized individuals in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana and Pakistan. Samasource also has just completed an iPhone application called Give Work, which employs youth in Dadaab, Kenya, the world's largest refugee camp, to complete short, on-screen tasks for companies abroad.

Janah says employing the world's poor this way is feasible because of several trends, including the rise in global literacy and a growing access to technology. "Literacy may not be growing at the pace of Moore's Law," she says, "but global literacy has risen steadily over the last few decades and so has access to technology. Computers are popping up everywhere in cyber-cafes, which can run on generators and get bandwidth from a satellite dish or a Wi-max tower." And thanks to the spread of fiber optic cables in Africa, the price for the average Kenyan to get online will decrease by 90% this year, she says, due to two new fiber optic cables in East Africa.

"The worst thing about poverty is wasted talent," Janah says. In Africa, she says, there are 144 million young people unemployed or working in low-level jobs, yet still living in poverty. In India, she says, there are 130 million surplus workers in rural areas, left behind by the staggering economic growth of the urban centers. In all, she says, 1 billion youth will face 50 percent unemployment over the next decade.

Education is not the problem in some areas, she says. In many parts of Africa, for example, families spend a large percentage of per capita income educating one or two children but then, post-graduation unemployment can be as high as 70 percent. Further, "young people whose families have begged and borrowed to put them through school end up joining gangs or militia groups that pay them," she says. Indeed, a recent piece in Wired magazine on the economics of piracy in Somalia showed that most pirates are fishermen who have traded in their nets for guns, "because the pay-off from ransom is better than that from fishing in their depleted waters," Janah says.

"Few of the informal jobs available to the poor take advantage of the education that so many young people now receive," she says. "Jobs like making handicrafts or selling things in local markets or hawking agricultural produce are not going to catapult people out of poverty in the long run."

But change is not only possible; it's probable in the years ahead, she says. Janah tells the story of Paul Parach, a 24-year-old from southern Sudan. He fled his village at the age of 9, walked across the border to Kenya and spent 15 years bouncing around refugee camps. Janah met him as part of an experiment to see whether Samasource could sign up refugees like Parach to do micro-work for a Silicon Valley company. "Paul spoke English and had gone to high school in the camp but had only touched a computer the week before we met him," Janah says. "He was eager to learn." He told Janah that people like him -- lucky enough to get a job in Dadaab -- can earn up to 50 cents a day. Janah told him he could earn double that in an hour doing micro-work.

But within a week of returning home from Dadaab, Janah said she got the "shock of her life" when she went online and saw a friend request from Parach on Facebook. "This young man, who was completely disconnected from the outside world, is now engaging with it -- and he is doing so as my peer," Janah says. "We've broken out of the one-way exchange that characterizes a handout. What people like Paul need most is not our charity; it's a decent way to earn a living."

Added Janah: "Work is the core of human dignity, it's how we define ourselves and our position in the world. This lack of work in the developing world, in my mind, represents the biggest threat to global stability."