Project name:
POKET
One-line project summary:
Bringing the Informal Economy Online with Crowdsourcing
Present your project.
1) There are estimated to be more than 1 billion undocumented merchants on earth. 90%+ of them lie in emerging economies (CityLab, 2016). This means small retailers and SMEs are largely unmapped in these countries. They don’t exist on Google Maps/Yelp, and remain marginalized and invisible. This poses key challenges for discoverability, visibility, city-planning and enterprises requiring retail insights and maps for these places.
2) Our solution is an Android application that incentivizes regular users to map their communities. In doing so, POKET is creating a crowd-sourced, consensus-driven registry of new unmapped merchants in the emerging world.
3) If scaled globally, POKET will be able to create new forms of work for the marginalized and unemployed in the bottom of the pyramid, connect merchants to financial services and the global economy, and create much-needed data to transform city-planning, public infrastructure and enterprise decisions globally to build better cities for all!
Submit a video.
What specific problem are you solving?
In the West, we mostly have large big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon that comprise the retail landscape. In emerging countries like Nigeria, Pakistan and Philippines, there are millions of small corner shops and SMEs instead - no/few big-box retailers. Unfortunately, we know very little about these merchants, since they're offline, cash-based, undocumented, and most importanty, unmapped - they don’t exist on a Google Maps or Yelp. This is a global problem - there are estimated to be more than 1 billion undocumented merchants on earth, where 90%+ of them lie in emerging economies (CityLab, 2016).
With the majority of these merchants unmapped, it means that cities don't have the data they need to help inform where to build the next bus stop, hospital, bank, mobile money agent, school. etc. It also means that these micro-entrepreneurs (mostly women across the African continent) and SMEs don't have a way of being discovered outside of their immediate communities. They are completely disconnected from the global economy, with no digital identity or online presence. It also means enterprises (like delivery companies, consumer goods firms, etc.) don't have the retail insights necessary to drive key decisions in their business.
What is your project?
POKET has developed a mobile application, engineered specifically for low-cost Android devices in emerging markets. It uses a brief tutorial to illustrate how users can use their phones to map places/conduct field research. Once users understand how the app works, it allows users to earn money for collecting the location/GIS data described above at scale using a form of consensus-driven crowdsourcing.
In a nutshell, we are paying young people to map and verify that a certain merchant/retailer exists in a certain location. They can "submit" a particular merchant by taking its photo, categorizing the types of items it sells, providing its name/contact info and of course its location. Once they do, their submission is reviewed for accuracy. If their submission is deemed accurate, they receive a small payment for their work. If their proposal is disputed and comes back as being false or inaccurate, they do not receive this payment. We have created a trust schema has been developed to incentivize truth-telling.
Once the crowdsourced data is aggregated and screened for accuracy using our proprietary AI, we amalgamate it on a dashboard so that government, private-sector organizations and NGOs can use it to make data-informed decisions for the first time!
Who does your project serve, and in what ways is the project impacting their lives?
1) Youth Seeking Work/Income: 30% of African Youth are unemployed (ILO, 2019). Young people in countries like Nigeria face massive barriers to finding employment, yet are often digital-savvy and literate. We have engaged thousands of young people in Lagos to map using their Android phones, and have been paid for this new form of task-based work. We have even created an in-app tutorial for digital skills training, and the results are overwhelmingly positive.
2) Citizens Searching for Businesses: Many citizens in emerging countries have no means of finding where key services like pharmacies are. This is because very few of these services exist on a public map. POKET will enable new forms of local search that simply do not currently exist in these markets for the informal sector.
3) Small Business Owners and Micro-Entrepreneurs: We are currently in Lagos deeply understanding the painpoints of this demographic. By being unmapped and undocumented, these business owners don't have the tools or papers needed to qualify for micro-financing, advertise their business or showcase their offerings. Our app will create their very first digital identity and bring them on for the very first time, giving them the means to start engaging with key services.
Which dimension of The Elevate Prize does your project most closely address?
Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behindExplain how your project relates to The Elevate Prize and your selected dimension.
Informal workers account for 60% of the adult population on Earth, but remain the most marginalized, powerless and disconnected from the global economy. Providing access to an innovation like POKET in these communities will elevate and uplift this massive group of people. With the Elevate Prize's support, we can help ensure that these people will be represented and visible online for the very first time. This creates inclusive trade for those who are marginalized, strengthens global supply chains, generates new data for the first time and paves the path to prosperity through the power of digital inclusion!
How did you come up with your project?
When I moved to Canada from Pakistan, one of the things that struck me is that every single place in Toronto had some sort of online presence - I could find any place in the city on Google Maps. However, large internet companies like Google have ignored these millions of merchants in developing countries, not because they do not have the resources to map them, but because they do not have the will. These small merchants do not yield ad-revenue and are mostly offline.
At the time I started thinking more deeply about this, I was teaching blockchain development courses (the only female instructor!) at York University, thinking deeply about the potential of a decentralized future. Given the sheer global magnitude of this problem, I knew that I had to take a community-driven approach to solving it. My friend (now co-founder) was working in location analytics at a telecom company, where he learned a great deal of the various applications and use-cases of location data. When we connected, I told him about this massive data gap, the decentralized approach in wanting to solve it, and he immediately began brainstorming several use-cases for this data - POKET was born!
Why are you passionate about your project?
I was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan for most of my life. My entire neighbourhood was filled with local shops - street hawkers selling mango drinks, merchants on the street selling corn and paan leaves, and small corner shops across every neighbourhood. These merchants were always the backbone of our communities, and largely, the Pakistani economy.
As I travelled and learned more about other countries, I began to understand that many countries look just like Pakistan in this regard. The informal sector is massive - employing 60% of the world's adults. However, it is still very poorly understood - we have little data as to where these merchants are, and what they sell. A great example of another country that resembles Pakistan in many regards is Nigeria. As we set out to solve this problem, our co-founder (Nigerian) had a strong desire to return to his home country and test our prototype. Luckily, it was a success, and now I'm excited to bring our solution to Pakistan!
Why are you well-positioned to deliver this project?
Firstly, crowdsourcing thousands, and one day millions of points of interest is no easy feat. The largest part of this exercise is a technical one - being able to analyze and sift through thousands of proposed crowdsourced places and detect false submissions/duplicate proposals either makes or breaks this type of platform. Fortunately, I have deep experience in machine-learning and AI sifting through thousands of data points to form inferences based on neural nets and build this capability. I received the Top 30 Under 30 Developer Award for Canada, largely on the basis of this work. As an example, I did both my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Engineering and spent years working in the IBM Watson AI team, specifically in the imaging division, which makes me very well suited to successfully building tools for us to ensure that we generate accurate maps.
Outside of my technical skills as the CTO, I have a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that emerging markets hold being born and raised in Pakistan. I have spent a tremendous amount of my time between emerging markets, focusing deeply on informal markets and the inclusion of women across the global economy. I'm also an advocate for women in STEM and gender equality. A large focus of our work is focusing on the disproportionately marginalized female merchants across West-Africa, who do not have any online presence for their shops or businesses. Lastly, I have a fantastic team whose strengths complement any and all of my weaknesses!
Provide an example of your ability to overcome adversity.
One of the key setbacks that I (like many others) have faced was how the pandemic made working on our project impossible (at the time). After some exciting pilot results with our protoype, our plan for this year was focused on launching our platform across Nigeria during February, for a period of 6+ months. However, as we learned about COVID-19 a few weeks later and were forced to shut down during the lockdown in Lagos, I was devastated - our whole year's plan had gone down the drain.
However, a new opportunity dawned upon me. This was focused on using our platform to help address the pandemic - within 48-hours, I rapidly made changed to our solution so that it can be used to map only healthcare outlets and their access/shortage to PPE (face masks and hand sanitizers). Immediatiely after, the rest of my team garnered front-line workers to generate data for the rest of the community to use. Fast forward a few months, and we have mapped out thousands of healthcare outlets, tracked the shortages of PPE across an entire state of Nigeria, and used this data to illuminate crucial shortages in health supply chains!
Describe a past experience that demonstrates your leadership ability.
There are several opportunities I can speak to, but there is one that I have done recently that I am especially proud of. I have always been an advocate of getting more girls introduced to STEM at an early age. I recently worked with a large Canadian mentorship program to lead several workshops and seminars that were focused on training a group of high school girls and university students on cloud computing skills. For the group that I individually mentored, I gave them the tools and knowledge they needed to develop the backend system of a full product. I also provided technical guidance to the front-end team and ensured the timely delivery of a robust, scalable system which will be the first of its kind for an NGO.
The outcome of this mentorship was that this young group of girls used these skills to build a product for what became an NGO in a record two months. Many of these were young students, most of them in 1st or 2nd year of university, who had no prior knowledge and experience in cloud computing or back-end API development - and now they have the tools to build solutions for change!
How long have you been working on your project?
2
Where are you headquartered?
Toronto, ON, CanadaWhat type of organization is your project?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar modelsIf you have additional video content that explains your project, provide a YouTube or Vimeo link here:
Describe what makes your project innovative.
Consensus Mechanism: We have gone through a rigorous exercise under one of the leading Game Theory economists at the University of Toronto to create a gamified, incentivization algorithm that encourages the ongoing proposal/verification of points of interest (POIs). It makes the generation of a quality registry of POIs the most logical objective for someone whose only goal is to profit financially. This minimizes the reliance on people acting altruistically, and isolates bad actors to ensure accurate collection.
Use of Crowdsourcing: Most existing data aggregation occurs through paying enumerators exorbitant amount of money to collect data every few years, through centralized means. Instead, we are incentivizing everyday users to crowdsource this data, similar to how Waze relies on proposals/verifications of traffic updates from drivers in a community. By curating this data on a public platform and making the places mapped attached to the people who mapped them, we are creating a new type of community-driven platform that we have not seen in the market before.
Proprietary AI and Dataset: We are creating new forms of data and intelligence around previously undiscovered, offline places. Although some countries have a basic idea of some of these places, the current data is extremely unreliable and shallow. In our pilot, 65%+ of the data we generated did not exist on Google maps of any existing platform. In addition to this, we have created in-house methodologies that combine several forms of intelligence to screen images, descriptions and locations of informal merchants to screen for accuracy.
Select the key characteristics of the community you are impacting.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your project address?
How many people does your project currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
Current # of People Being Served (small, controlled, test pilot):
a) roughly 2500 merchants in Lagos which are now mapped
b) 250 field-researchers who are using the app to map and earn
in 1-Year (post-launch):
a) roughly 50,000 merchants mapped in two different markets
b) 1500 users who are using the app to map and earn
in 5-Years (in 10 cities, after fundraising rounds)
a) roughly 10,000,000 merchants in 10 cities mapped
b) 250,000 users who are using the app to map and earn
What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?
1-Year KPIs:
a) roughly 50,000 merchants mapped in two different markets
b) 1500 users who are using the app to map and earn
c) Revenue of $150,000 USD+
Overall, our 3-5 year ambitions are:
1) empower 1-million young people to earn money with new forms of work using just their smartphone
2) allow 10-million+ SMEs in the 10-cities we select to be fully mapped, discoverable and searchable by their communities
3) create a SaaS platform where any organization can issue bounties to people in their communities to complete micro-tasks (like mapping and uncovering retail insights)
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and in the next five years?
1) Financial: Now that we have completed the development of a prototype and piloted it in Lagos, and gotten a paid client, we are hoping to scale this innovation. Access to greater financial services will allow us to fund the development of a robust product to launch across Lagos and a second city later this year. The funding from the Elevate Prize would be a massive help in achieving this mission.
2) Local Partners: We are eagerly looking for more local partners that could help us engage and access unemployed youth, starting with Lagos, Nigeria. We are actively hoping to connect with more NGOs and organizations who can help mobilize many young people who would benefit from this form of work.
3) Cultural: In our countries of focus (ex. Nigeria or Pakistan) trust is a large challenge. People are generally skeptical to download new applications on their phones that already have limited space and tech specs.
4) Market Barriers: In many of the cities and countries we are interested, smartphone and internet adoption are still too low for us to scale. Internet speeds and hardware specs are also a little less developed than we would prefer.
How do you plan to overcome these barriers?
1) Financial: In the next few months, we are opening a round of financing to fund the next 18-months of our operations. We are actively exploring grant opportunities in the impact domain since our product has immense social benefit to multiple stakeholders within the communities of the cities we are working in.
2) Local Partners: As mentioned, we are starting conversations with universities in Lagos and have already struck a partnership with the University of Lagos (Geography Department). We have also become official partners of Esri, the world's leader in location intelligence tools.
3) Cultural: We have started adopting local tactics and engaging with young people on campuses, military service centres, social events to build brand equity and encourage adoption. We are also exploring the use of campus ambassador and influencer marketing in these countries and understanding what the best set of steps are to emulate this adoption journey in several markets.
4) Market Barriers: Smartphone penetration is suggested to double in Sub-Saharan Africa between 2018 and 2025 from 37% to 74%, and we are already seeing countries like Pakistan and Nigeria adding 15-25 million new internet users annually, almost all via smartphone. We've also now seen smartphones release this year that cost $45 USD and have all of the specs we need to deliver our solution with high-precision GPS accuracy.
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
1) Trade Commission Service of Canada - POKET is a TCS Client and therefore works with Global Affairs Canada in exploring new clients and areas of expansion for our application.
2) Creative Destruction Lab/University of Toronto - World's leading AI accelerator, CDL is also the only academic founding partner of Facebook's Libra Association
3) Ryerson Social Venture Zone - Supports Canadian social entrepreneurs
4) CCHub Nigeria - A co-working space in Lagos focused on innovation and adoption of new technology
5) MIT SOLVE - Has given us financial and in-kind resources for legal work, media opportunities, relevant connections on the ground, and several more opportunities.
6) University of Lagos - to help engage young people in Lagos.
7) Esri - We are official partners of ESRI and part of their startup program, focused on supporting promising start-ups focused on location intelligence and GIS tools.
What is your business model?
We generate location data using crowdsourcing and then monetize/license/resell it at a profit to enterprise clients. In some cases, we generate the data first (ex. location of pharmacies in Nigeria) and then re-sell this dataset to various organizations via direct sales or online marketplaces. In other cases, we act as a consultant, allowing organizations to tell us about a particular dataset they need (ex. map of all the food merchants in Karachi, Pakistan). We would then activate our platform to generate this data rapidly.
The following are the customers/beneficiaries:
1) Regular users looking for new forms of work: These smartphone users are getting paid a small bounty for mapping merchants in their communities using the POKET app on their smartphones. In doing so, we are creating new forms of work for people that were not possible until now.
2) Small Retailers/Merchants/Micro-Entrepreneurs: These SME retailers/independent mom & pop shops now benefit from being mapped, which means greater visibility, free advertising, more foot traffic and ultimately more sales in their stores
3) Enterprise Clients (POKET's Customers): Companies in the consumer packaged goods industry, banks, mobile money companies, logistics and delivery companies, pharmaceuticals, etc. benefit from greater retail insights about where their products are, where their competitors' products are, price points, and brand penetration. We have already signed on the exclusive Nigerian distributor for one of the largest pharma/medical device companies in the world. We are now interested in exploring new markets and use-cases with the help of Elevate!
What is your path to financial sustainability?
Currently we are using investment capital and grants to fund our work. Although we have started generating early-revenue, our long-term ambition is to create a SaaS platform that enterprises can use to access location data for emerging countries and also issue their own bounties. This is similar to the model we saw FourSquare pursue, however our focus is in emerging economies where there is a substantial gap in retail insights and location intelligence. Our business also have very favourable unit economics, where we maintain a 70%-90% margin on enterprise insights that we charge between $5-$15 USD for.
If you have raised funds for your project or are generating revenue, please provide details.
Funding:
$100,000 USD (Equity from 4 VC Funds: Bloomberg Beta, Globalive Capital, Portag3 Ventures, Data Collective
$10,000 MIT SOLVE Grant
$25,000 General Motors Community-Driven Innovation
Revenue:
$5000 USD (ISN), August 2019
If you seek to raise funds for your project, please provide details.
We will be raising $1-1.5M USD in the next 3-6 months via grants and equity investments.
What are your estimated expenses for 2020?
Total: $475,000 USD
Breakdown As Follows:
Software Developer Salary (12-Months) - $70,000 USD
Software Developer Salary (12-Months) - $70,000 USD
Software Developer Salary (12-Months) - $70,000 USD
Operations Manager Salary (12-Months) - $70,000 USD
Business Development Salary (12-Months) - $60,000 USD
Business Development Salary (12-Months) - $60,000 USD
UI/UX Designer Wages (Contract, 6-Months) - $15,000 USD
Junior Developer Wages (Contract, 3-Months) - $15,000 USD
Travel & Accommodation - $15000
Advertising & Marketing - $15,000
Accounting & Bookkeeping - $5,000
Legal Fees - $5,000
AWS & Server Fees - $5000
Why are you applying for The Elevate Prize?
The POKET team is working on a challenge that is very aligned with the Elevate Prize's mandate - an innovation that is entirely focused on uplifting marginalized people, whether in helping address youth unemployment with a new gig-economy-like platform for field research (POKET) or creating digital identities for merchants. There are a few things we believe will really benefit us if we were to win the competition:
1) Technical expertise and resources for further developing our product, specifically for the emerging world (ex. AWS credits, access to tools, etc.)
2) Funding that will enable us to scale and grow our innovation to more communities outside of Lagos, Nigeria
3) Access to clients, partner organizations and inroads to people that Elevate Prize can facilitate introductions to that have needs for large sets of location data - which we can generate using our solution!
We hope these inroads lead to new mentorship, deeper understanding of key markets, additional funding opportunities and new partnerships that we would not be able to access if it were not for this exciting prize opportunity!
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
Aside from organizations focused on youth unemployment and digital skills in emerging markets, some other intros we would really appreciate are:
1) Consumer Goods, Pharma, Medical Devices & Pharma
2) Financial Services, Mobile Payments, Banking, Micro-Finance
3) Delivery, Logistics & E-Commerce
4) Public Sector, Ministries and Trade Organizations
5) NGOs, Humanitarian Organizations, Universities & Research Organizations
We believe that across these several industries for any particular country, there are several use-cases that we can enable using our solution. Some examples include Proctor & Gamble, their local distributor, Johnson & Johnson, Mastercard Foundation, Ministries of Food/Health/Urban Planning, etc.
Please explain in more detail here.
1) Funding & Revenue Model - We are seeking introductions to investors of early-stage technology focused on emerging markets
2) Legal or regulatory matters: We want to make sure we are compliant with local privacy laws and regulations around data collection and taxation as we scale across several markets
3) Board members or advisors: We are looking to grow the mentors we have that have market-specific domain expertise and contacts
Solution Team
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Naba Siddiqui Co-Founder and CTO, POKET
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Your bio:
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, I am passionate about using emerging technology to improve lives for all, with a key focus on marginalized populations in South Asia and West Africa. I am also a vocal advocate for women of colour in STEM, and have completed both my Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Masters in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. I have been recognized as a Top 30 Under 30 Developer for Canada and have held various technical roles across several industries. Some of these include the IBM Watson AI team and RBC Cyber Security Team. Some of my technical areas of expertise include developing core back-end systems to AI powered applications, from DevOps to Cloud Security. I am also the only female blockchain instructor at The BlockchainHub where I teach courses on the Hyperledger Fabric. Most importantly, I'm the Chief Technology Officer of POKET! https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabasiddiqui/