Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

Wasted talent is one of poverty’s greatest ills. 1 billion youth in poor regions will face 50% unemployment in the next decade. Joblessness is linked to increased crime, terrorism, and rebel activity. At the same time, low-cost internet access is spreading across the developing world and presents unprecedented employment opportunities through web-based work.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Samasource is a non-profit social enterprise that enables women, youth, and refugees to build livelihoods through computer-based microwork. Our model has three parts. First, we identify local service partners who can employ people to provide services, using stringent criteria that verify our service partners' capacity for deep social impact. Next, we provide service partners with specific training. Finally, we market our Service Partners' services to paying clients, and establish profiles for each worker on Samasource.org where they return to receive new assignments and complete work.

We now work with 18 small businesses, nonprofit training centers, and rural data centers that provide jobs to over 500 people in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Pakistan. With only $50K in funding with from donors and an all-volunteer staff, Samasource has generated over $220K in work. Our clients have included large web companies, university libraries, and nonprofits.

We've recently developed a Facebook platform that allows application developers to outsource the testing of their products to Samasource partners. We have launched a refugee work program in the Dabaab, Kenya, refugee camp. And we have released an iPhone application called GiveWork that sends crowdsourced tasks to the refugees we train. Since this October more than 20,000 tasks have been completed for a total of more than 100,000 points. The monetary equivalent of 100 points can buy half a fish and a loaf of bread.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Samasource takes a holistic approach in leveraging technology to make joblessness a thing of the past:

For our service partners
Samasource programs provide individuals with portable, marketable skills. Our training focuses on some of the most highly marketable jobs available via the internet, like data entry and image moderation. We are now actively connecting our partners to microwork jobs that are crowdsourced, like tagging images, categorizing strings of text, and other small, web-based tasks. This space is growing rapidly as companies get better at learning what tasks can be handed off to a third party, which means that even outside of the realm of our programs, the partners we work with and the people they employ will be more competitive in the global marketplace.

For our clients
Our client organizations in the U.S. and other developed regions use Samasource as a resource for skilled work. We offer services that make it possible for our clients to get work done that would not be financially feasible otherwise. For instance, because young Facebook application developers can rely on our partners to test their work for $1 per application per week, developers who once put un-tested applications online due to prohibitive prices now turn to our partners for testing. As our clients improve their products, they give our partners work that did not exist before. We generate confidence for our clients by screening partners using stringent due-diligence criteria, conducting a rigorous training program, and following up on quality assurance.

For the world
We are seeking to transform the way people can contribute to poverty alleviation by creating the first model for sustainable outsourcing and the first marketplace for fair-trade services. We’re enabling socially responsible companies and entrepreneurs to contribute to economic development by buying services from people in the places that need them most.