Lifting people out of poverty through digital work

I think I might need a clicker, which may be sitting right next to you. Thank you. I'm so grateful to be here. I have to start by just saying how grateful we are in my country right now to have the example of Denmark. I'm sure you've been following our political situation. As one of my friends put it, it's as if we're in the final TV show, or the final series of the TV show America, and the writers have gone crazy. Which is definitely what it feels like on the ground. And a few years ago we were all surprised to learn there was a study that came out, which I'm sure you all saw, that showed that the American dream, this idea of meritocracy that someone on the very bottom can, in his or her lifetime, earn wealth and make it to the very top. We learned that the American dream is actually more alive in Denmark than it is in the United States today. And that's because you put in place some really amazing social institutions that level the playing field and that allow intergenerational prosperity in a way that unfortunately we're no longer seeing in the United States. So you may not realize this, but many of us, where I'm from, look to you as an example of what's possible, especially in times like these. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I do, about Salma and Lakshmi, and about the broader concept that underlies both this idea of giving work as the most powerful solution to end poverty. I'll tell you first how I got started doing this work. So this is me in Ghana in the year 2000. In 1998 I got a scholarship from, of all places, a big tobacco company. And in the U.S. we don't have publicly funded tertiary education or college for most of us, so you kind of have to rely on private donations. And I had applied for all the scholarships I could, and lo and behold I'd gotten one from, of all places, this big tobacco company called L'Orealard. And I decided two years later to use the money to take basically like a gap year. I took six months off, I graduated a little bit early from high school, and I wanted to have an adventure. I wanted to travel around the world or see another country. My parents had grown up in India, and I had never spent any time in India. And I had grown up my whole life hearing from them that I had to eat all the food on my plate because of the starving kids back in India. Well I wanted to find out what those starving kids actually looked like and have an experience in a developing country. And so I graduated early, I packed my bags, and I went to Ghana. And like many inspired young people, I thought I would show up in Africa and save poor children. I had this vision in my head that I would go and I would teach English to these poor little children in Ghana, and I would save them, and somehow they would no longer be poor because of my generosity. So I got there, and I was shocked when my students could name U.S. senators, could recite poetry in English, could tell me their favorite books, like real works of literature, and in many ways were as bright, if not brighter, than my high school classmates. And it struck me that just because of an accident of birth, they had been born in a really poor country. And that many of them were extremely hardworking and very bright. And this myth that we have about poverty being caused by poor people, which unfortunately is alive and well in the United States right now, we blame poor people for their poverty. We assume that they're poor because they're not working hard enough, they don't have the Protestant work ethic, or they're not skilled enough. Well, that's absolutely a myth. And for me, I saw that firsthand, living for six months in rural Ghana, in a village where everybody made less than $2 an egg. When one of my favorite students, a young man named Femi, told me that his favorite book was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which my high school advanced English teacher had recommended to me, which is an amazing novel if you haven't read it, I had this aha moment. And I realized that I A. wanted to spend my life working on global poverty because it was a crime to me that someone like Femi could be so poor despite being so bright and so articulate and so hardworking. And B. that I wanted to address poverty in a way that wasn't demeaning, that gave people their full humanity, that didn't treat them as charity cases. One of the things I found throughout the course of my time in Ghana, and that I later studied international development and worked at the World Bank and for several NGOs, is that we have this attitude towards poor people, which is very patronizing. We tend to think of them as incapable or helpless, that we are somehow saviors. And there's been a revolution in aid with the advent of microfinance, which has changed some of that. But I'd say for the most part, the way our aid institutions are designed, the way that organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, USCID, or maybe in some ways, Danita, your agency for international development, the way that these institutions were designed from 50 or 60 years ago is very paternalistic fundamentally. And I think that the best way to change that is to reimagine our relationship with the poor. We shouldn't stop trying to address poverty, but we should stop trying to address it in a paternalistic way. And I think the best way to do that is to give work rather than handouts. Now this seems super obvious to a group of people who is obviously passionate about entrepreneurship and using the internet, but for those of us in the aid world and in the nonprofit sector, this can be heretical thinking. The idea of giving work, that giving work is more powerful than giving food or shelter or some other form of aid is a little bit counterintuitive for people who have been used to that model. We think that the best way to help someone is to provide them with free stuff. And unfortunately, that turns out to be a band aid in most cases. So I learned in Ghana, having seen poverty firsthand and having talked to a lot of people who made less than $2 a day, that the fundamental need that everybody expressed was work. And the beauty of work is that it gives you income and the beauty of income is that you can spend it on the types of goods and services you actually want, as opposed to what somebody else in a country like Denmark or the United States thinks you want. Unfortunately, the vast majority of aid is still deployed in ways that are paternalistic, in ways that prescribe how poor people should use those goods and services. We donate mosquito nets to help end malaria. We build wells because we want people to have clean drinking water. We build schools because we want people to get educated. But what we've seen is that in the long run, it's so much more effective to figure out ways to get poor people employment. When they get employment, they take that income and they spend it on education and on food and on shelter, and they tend to value the things that they spend it on much more than if we just gave it to them. They also tend to build institutions with that income that will outlast any donor interest. We've seen in so many cases in developing countries how people will build wells out of charity and out of really good heart. And then that well won't be used because it turns out we built the well in the wrong area, or we built the well in a community where nobody knows how to maintain the well, or we built a school in a place where actually the real need isn't more classrooms, but it's better teachers to fill those classrooms. It's really difficult for someone on the other side of the world who doesn't have a clear understanding of what local needs are to design a solution. And so for all of these reasons, giving work, I believe, is the best way to end poverty. So a couple of years out of undergrad, I had become deeply frustrated. I'd worked at the World Bank, which says when you walk in, our dream is a world free of poverty on the wall, which was super exciting, except that at the time that I worked at the World Bank, it had pretty much only been run by investment bankers, people who did not have a lot of experience on the ground talking to poor people. Now, thankfully, with Jim Kim, it's a new era, but I decided I wanted to start an organization that would fight poverty by giving work, and that would actually measure how many poor people we moved out of poverty each year and by how much, and at what cost to donors. And at the time, this was around 2005 when I had the idea for what became Sama Source, our first program. Tom Friedman had just written the book The World is Flat, and I was incredibly inspired by the idea that the internet could level the playing field, that the internet could allow someone in rural Africa to benefit from the same kinds of job opportunities that someone in Copenhagen or New York might access. And that idea, I thought, could be transformed into some kind of a business model that could really help low-income people in a measurable way. I was inspired by the global outsourcing industry, which is a pretty boring industry, if any of you have ever been to an outsourcing conference or are familiar with this space, it's a gigantic industry, about a trillion dollars, that involves doing the back office work for big companies. Things like data entry and tagging documents and transcribing information and handling purchase order data, all of that stuff can now be done by third parties through the internet. And I thought, what if we could take this industry, which has generated several billionaires in India and China and the Philippines, what if we could take this industry and turn it on its head, and use it instead to generate a few dollars for the billions of people living in poverty. And that idea eventually became Sama. I found a local internet cafe operator in Nairobi to do a pilot with me, and I had this idea, what if I could win contracts from big Silicon Valley companies and teach local people on the ground in Kenya who come from slums, who come from neighborhoods not too dissimilar from what I had seen in Ghana, and teach these young people to do this work from local internet cafes. And so we started a pilot. I found a guy who was my age, who was 25 at the time, and he ran a tiny internet cafe with four computers, and he told me he was struggling to make ends meet with his business model because nobody in Nairobi could afford to spend a dollar an hour on computer time, on internet time. So we decided to pivot his model, and I told him, I'll teach you how to do data entry, I'm going to go and win a contract from someone in Silicon Valley, and let's see if we can do this. And so we signed our first contract in September of 2008 for $30,000, and it was to digitize books for blind readers. So I trained people in Kenya from slums to look at images of text and transcribe the text into text files. Now, thanks to optical character recognition technology, we no longer need humans to do that, but that was what we first started doing, and we grew substantially from there. Today, we have over a thousand full-time workers in East Africa, South Asia, and Haiti doing work for some of the top companies in the world and in Silicon Valley. We've done projects with Google, with Microsoft, with Walmart, and a lot of our projects are really at the cutting edge of fields like machine learning. One of the things I'm most excited about is a project that we have been doing for self-driving car technology. I believe that we're now the biggest image tagging firm for this category for self-driving cars, so we receive images from the bumpers and dash cams of cars, and those images we code in very precise detail, and we send those back to the auto companies, and they use those images to train their algorithms so that the self-driving car that you saw in the Volvo commercial is actually powered by data from people in places like slums in Kenya, which is such a cool application, I think, of the Internet. We've performed over 200 million tasks on a proprietary software platform that we developed called the Sama Hub. We've completed over 200 projects, and we've paid out over $10 million in wages to low-income people. Now, and I'll just admit it to talk about our overall impact. What this has meant is that we've moved over 7,500 individual workers out of poverty, and I'll tell you how we define that in a minute, as well as their family members, for a combined total of over 30,000 people. And to see this kind of an impact with the traditional aid model in our time frame would be really hard. It's really hard to move people out of poverty so that they stay that way, right? It's much easier to give them access to a resource, again, a well or a school or some kind of benefit, like a health clinic. But to actually move them out of poverty permanently is really difficult to do, and I think the only way you can do it is by giving people work and exposing them to the formal economy and giving them a leg up into future employment. So let me tell you a little bit about what this impact means for an individual one of our workers. So before Sama, we only hire people who make less than $2.50 a day, less than a local living wage. We actually screen people out if they're wealthier than this. We're actually one of the only tech companies in the world that will not take you if you're really qualified. We only take people who are not qualified for these jobs, who are living and working in the informal economy. So what does that mean to live on less than $2.50 a day? It means that you're living in informal housing. That's code word for slum. That's a picture of me with the child of one of our workers whose story I'll tell you in a minute in Mathare Slum in Kenya. It means you have poor nutrition. We do extensive surveys on our workforce, and we have found that the biggest source of calories for most of our workers before they join Sama in Nairobi is sugar cane. They're basically eating pure sugar. It's the cheapest way to get calories. Very limited educational opportunities. Mostly you're going to government schools that are very poorly funded. And inadequate health care. After Sama, we on average take people to above $8 a day, which doesn't sound like much here, but it's more than three times the income that they start with. And many of our workers in locations like Nairobi actually get to closer to $16 a day, which is a dramatic transformation. The first thing they do is they move out of the slum to get better housing. They access safe food or healthier food. So they're eating fruits and vegetables and protein. Higher education. Many of them are using this money to save for college. And health care access. We also see them investing in things we would have never expected. One of our workers in northern Uganda started a pig farm with the money that she made at Sama, and she actually runs this pig farm as a side business while she is a project manager for us in northern Uganda. So she's creating now five or six additional jobs in her village just through her Sama earnings, using them as a source of capital. I want to humanize this for you by telling you the story of one of our workers. This is a young man named Ken Kiara, who I met two years ago. Ken comes from Mathare, which is an informal settlement in Nairobi. And before Sama, even though Ken had finished high school, there are a number of young people in the English-speaking countries of sub-Saharan Africa who actually have a decent education. They finish high school. Thanks to the investment we all have made in building educational institutions, people finish high school and then there's nothing for them to do. So Ken had to move back to his slum, and he was picking trash out of this river. It's called Mathare River. It's basically a giant sewer. He's picking trash out of this river and selling it to the local recycler for about $1.50 a day. This trash picking and recycling is what a shocking number of young people do for a living in urban slums around the world. Ken was just one of them. Well, one day he heard that there was a computer program in the edge, in this little center at the edge of the slum. And he walked in there and he signed up. He had always been curious about computers. He'd seen one from afar, but he'd never actually touched one and worked on a computer. So he started taking these computer classes, and that program was a feeder for Sama. So we hired him at Sama about two years ago. He started doing basic data entry tasks. Then he quickly got promoted because he's such a bright young guy. And now he is a trainer for us in Mathare. He goes back and recruits young people from Mathare. He makes about ten times, more than ten times, what he made when he was coming in, which was just under $2 a day. And he has recruited dozens of young people into our program. Ken's life has completely transformed. He moved out of the slum. He sends his daughter to a good school now. He no longer has to live in that giant open sewer, which is Mathare. And his mission is to get other young people to see their own possibilities, to see what's possible when they're given a chance and start doing internet-based work. This model can also work in developed countries. In the United States we have some deep pockets of poverty in places like the rural South. This is a young man named Gary. Actually I shouldn't say young, he's probably a middle-aged man. Middle-aged man named Gary. And unfortunately a lot of our anti-poverty programs in the US miss people like him. People like him are not sexy to serve, right? They're not orphans, they're not young people in Africa. They don't tug at our heartstrings the way that maybe someone like Ken or even someone younger would. But people like Gary are really important to serve because they represent a middle class which is falling out of the middle across the United States. And I'm sure this is a big problem in Europe as well. Gary used to be employed as a factory worker. He worked in a dog food factory in his hometown, which is a very, very small town in the Mississippi River Delta, which is a deeply poor part of the rural South. And when the factory closed, he lost his job. He's a military veteran with a lot of skills, but there are no jobs in his community. So he discovered that in order to find work, he'd have to drive two hours outside of his town and the gas prices just wouldn't make that viable. So he was stuck jobless in this really rural area living in a trailer. We recruited Gary into a class that we set up called Sama School, which is basically taking all of the stuff that we learned from working in Kenya and India and putting it online at samascool.org. It's free, anyone can use it. We now have 10,000 people enrolled in that program. Gary went through our training, and he ended up getting a job as a virtual call center worker. So now he makes well above minimum wage working from his home without the gas bill, without having to commute, and he's able to do work as a virtual call center agent. Now again, this isn't the sexiest type of work. It doesn't look pretty in an image, but it pays the bills. And this is the kind of thing that millions more people could have access to if we gave them training in the digital economy. So that's what our mission is at Sama, to expand this idea of giving work to include as many low-income people as we can, and to get governments and NDOs and other actors who are trying to end poverty to think about that in a really different way. I'm going to tell you about the second company I started called Lakshmi really briefly, and then I hope we have some time for questions. So in northern Uganda, where I was visiting for Sama, we have a center there that's employed several people locally, several dozen people locally. I came across this really amazing ingredient. It's called nylotica. It's a local nut that women press into a butter and use as a skin cream in northern Uganda. And I became really curious whether we might start another give-work company around this raw ingredient. And so a couple of years after I found this nut, I decided to start a company called Lakshmi, which is going to take this fair trade and organic, beautiful raw ingredient and market it in a way that's different from what we're used to seeing in the fair trade industry. In the United States especially, fair trade products tend to be marketed in a very granola kind of way. They're sold at health food stores. They're sold to people like me who are pretty granola, who believe in social impact and who look for the fair trade label. But I think the real win is if we can get the woman who buys Chanel or Dior skin cream, the woman who would never touch a hippie granola product, to buy something that's fair trade because of beautiful design and beautiful storytelling. If we can get her to buy into the vision of a natural product, just the way that we got Google to buy into essentially fair trade outsourcing, that's how we could really change the world. So we launched online last year in November. We're going to be distributed nationally with two major retailers in the United States in September. Hopefully, maybe with Fashion Train we'll be in Denmark and Europe soon. And we've now been selling on our website. And I think that the reception so far has been fantastic. People are really yearning for upscale luxury natural brands. I think we're filling an untapped need. So I will end with just this one call to action. Since I'm a nonprofit entrepreneur, I always have to ask people for stuff. So I will ask all of you, when you go home, if you own a business, to think about ways that you can apply this concept of giving work to your business. It can be through the way you source. If you are sourcing raw ingredients from somewhere, think about sourcing from fair trade producers. If you are in the position of hiring people, think about how you can hire people from a marginalized background, maybe from part of your business. It doesn't have to be 100% of your workforce. But if every business decided to allocate 1% of their supply chain budget to organizations like Sama, and there are many more just like us that can help you find some if you're curious, imagine how much better the world would be. Imagine if we could transform the way we think about people like Ken and people like my students in Ghana from charity cases to producers, to workers, to people who can help build the global economy. I think that's the real win, and I hope that's the future of the Internet age. Thank you so much.