Karya

Karya

Karya

Karya brings AI-enabled earning and learning opportunities to low-income communities across the Global South in their local languages.

Bengaluru, Karnataka

India

Nonprofit

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Across India and the Global South, millions of people remain excluded from dignified work not because they lack ability, but because economic opportunity is designed around the privileged few: people who are urban, formally credentialed, and able to work in dominant languages. The scale of this exclusion is enormous. Globally, 2 billion people — more than 60% of the world’s employed population — work in the informal economy, often without stable protections, rights, or fair pay. In India, the exclusion is especially visible for women: female labour-force participation remains far below men’s, limiting income and mobility for millions of households. At the same time, infrastructure for more inclusive digital work already exists. 80% of rural Indians have access to a smartphone. India’s linguistic diversity is vast: Census records 121 languages in India with 10,000+ speakers. Yet the digital economy rarely converts this connectivity, linguistic diversity, and local knowledge into fair-paying work for low-income communities. This creates a double failure. Low-resource communities are denied meaningful income and mobility, while digital systems are built without the people and contexts they are meant to serve. Karya exists to correct both.

Karya is a smartphone-based platform that connects low-income communities to fair-paying digital work in their own languages. We break complex digital tasks into accessible microtasks that can be completed from home on a basic smartphone, without requiring English fluency or prior technical experience. Workers begin with tasks such as speech recording, translation, image and text annotation, or contextual data collection. As they gain experience, they can move into higher-value work such as AI evaluation through structured skilling pathways. Our model is designed around dignity, not extraction. We partner with AI companies, enterprises, researchers, and increasingly governments that need high-quality multilingual data and evaluation work. Their demand funds real income opportunities for communities that have traditionally been excluded from the digital economy. In practice, Karya is building an economic participation infrastructure that allows low-resource communities to convert the language, knowledge, and context they already hold into income, confidence, experience, and longer-term mobility.

Karya serves low-income workers routinely excluded from formal employment and the digital economy. 72% of our workers report $0 in prior income, and the average pre-Karya income for the communities we serve is $156 per year. On average, Karya pays our workers 20 times the local minimum wage, giving people work in their own languages, on devices they already own, in formats that fit their responsibilities and constraints. Last year, the average Karya worker received a 25.8% lift in their annual household income, from just a few hours of supplementary work. For our communities, the barrier is not talent — it is the absence of work designed around their realities. Karya meets workers where they are. The immediate impact is meaningful income; the deeper impact is broader. Workers gain confidence, digital experience, and progression into more complex tasks. Families use earnings for food, school fees, debt, and medical care. Women gain financial agency without needing to migrate. Communities gain representation as their languages and contexts become valuable in the digital economy. Our goal is to build a worker-first pathway through which people long excluded from opportunity can participate in the next economy, the ongoing AI revolution, on fairer terms.