Digital livelihoods for Disadvantaged Youth

Create a platform where disadvantaged youth can join the interconnected global digital economy, get paid for completing computer based crowd sourced micro and mini jobs, all while gaining valuable skills and education - a pathway to their self-sustaining future and digital livelihoods.

Our solution tackles unemployment, poverty and lack of employable skills. For many youth in developing countries the opportunities to break the cycle of poverty are scarce. Education and work options are limited, and often there is a need to drop out of school and work to support family. Meanwhile, the world has become interconnected in a shared digital economy that would allow anyone with rudimentary digital skills to complete outsourced jobs. The problem is that marginalized youth in developing countries are not aware of these digital opportunities nor do they have tools to access them.

In March 2017 “THE NEXUS OF MICROWORK AND IMPACT SOURCING Implications For Youth Employment” study concluded that the microwork model using Impact Sourcing parameters is well suited to disadvantaged, less skilled youth, and in particular, to young women and girls, as it offers adaptable and flexible work arrangements, while requires minimal training and formal education. Emerging evidence points to impact sourcing workers being able to access other job and educational opportunities following their employment with an impact sourcing service provider, based on improved soft and technical skills, increased familiarity with work environments, and stronger resume and job references.

The first phase of the project will be delivered as a 2-4 year graduation program in a pilot delivery centre in Cambodia. The centre will provide up to 40 disadvantaged youth aged 17-25 (50% women) with access to computers, Internet, education facilities and trainers. After participating in the program, the youth will have earned a salary and acquired global digital market ready computer skills, increased English language proficiency, soft skills and financial capability. These transferable skills will allow them to work as independent freelancers or apply for long term employment in the private sector.

Participants to take bi-annual computer, English language, business soft skills and financial literacy assessment - Improved computer, language, financial literacy and soft skills

Participants to take annual livelihoods assessment, including poverty scorecard and family situation - Improved livelihoods

Former participants to take assessment every 2 years including poverty scorecard, family situation, job situation and retention of skills gained - Long term improved livelihoods

Existing impact sourcing initiatives liaise directly with overseas corporate clients and have to bid and win contracts to acquire work. Our approach is unique as we will use existing online outsourcing distribution platforms such as Amazon mTurk and Upwork. These existing platforms take care of all online micro and mini job transactions between the buyer and the vendor, from production to coordination, quality control, delivery, and payment.  By using currently available market tools we are not creating dependency for the youth or center managers on forming contracts with outsourcing companies or overseas business clients.

The development of centre’s skills curriculum will involve various stakeholders including youth, employers and business representatives throughout the design to ensure the training is relevant and tailored to address youth’s particular needs and skill level. We will partner participants with student mentors from universities and they will work in teams where more experienced participants support junior participants in explaining systems and processes and lead the teams completing the jobs. Part of the curriculum will include teaching the participants to become digital self-learners in their own future and learn in a way that makes most sense to them.

To facilitate disadvantaged youth participation we will establish centres in locations where there is significant unemployment and poverty. We will work with local NGOs already working with underprivileged youth, for example garbage pickers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh Cambodia, to come up with a strategy for the most suitable location and marketing process. For clients there will be no difference - the services will be accessed in the same way they currently access the micro/mini tasking websites.

Income earned from completed micro/mini tasks will flow into a common pool to cover the salaries of participants and the running costs of the centre. Based on global research non-profit impact sourcing implementers are slowly seeing a reduction in subsidies required for operations as they improve their quality, gain new clients, automate their processes, and begin to generate more profit. To further reduce the costs, particularly for the education component, we will use existing global digital learning resources and mentoring partnerships with universities.

Good Return has several corporate and not for profit funding partners who support our mission. We are confident that this project will be attractive to many of them, particularly the corporate partners who could potentially use the services of the center for a real business demand at the same time fulfilling their corporate social responsibility mission.

Participants’ ability to understand the micro tasks in English could be an issue, particularly in Cambodia. We will do a proper study in order to determine the most suitable partnerships with a local NGO that is already providing English language training to disadvantaged youth.

Also, as this type of model hasn’t been tested before there could be a chance of not finding enough/reliable micro work through existing online resources. In this case we would create a hybrid model where some of the work would be sourced via overseas corporate clients.

http://www.worlded.org/WEIInternet/aboutus/annualreport.cfm

http://cambodia.worlded.org/theme-areas/promoting-youth-development-and-safer-migration/

http://www.worlded.org/WEIInternet/international/project/display.cfm?ctid=na&cid=na&txtGeoArea=INTL&tid=40&id=9401&thisSection=international&thisSectionTitle=International&thisPage=

Access mentoring in social enterprise set up. Access to collaboration with other global innovators to strengthen the proposed solution. Increase the visibility of the solution, and find further partners and resources to set up and scale

• Various local education NGOs such as KAPE
• Cambodian/Nepali Ministry of Education
• Central Bank of Cambodia, Various Micro Finance Institutions in Cambodia, Nepal, Philippines
• SHE investments (Business training and mentoring for women)
• Zaman University (one-on-one Financial Coaching Program for vulnerable village consumers)

Other impact sourcing companies, such as Samasource and DDD could be considered as competitors.