Help Haiti from Home

Ashoka Peace Blog   
February 23rd, 2010

By Priya Parker

Even if you have already donated money to assist the people of Haiti, you might also consider donating a few hours of your work.  And you don’t even have to leave your bedroom.

Mission 4636 is an emergency-reporting service that surfaced in the wake of the January 12 earthquake.  Anyone in Haiti with a cellphone can SMS the number 4636 with a message that would immediately be sent to a database of volunteers managed by the organization Ushahidi. (See Sarah Jefferson’s post on Ushahidi here). Ushahidi translates the message from Creole or French into English, categorizes it, geo-tags it, and plots it on a map. It is then streamed back to responders on the ground in Haiti.  [You can volunteer here].

To date, Mission 4636 has received 30,000 messages and, according to its blog, “has directed emergency response teams to hundreds of medical emergencies and directed the first food and water to tens of thousands.”

Combining Crowdsourcing and Micro-work
An interesting and innovative collaboration is developing among organizations and businesses in “crisismapping,” crowdsourcing, emergency relief, and “micro-work.”

Two organizations in particular, Samasource and Crowdflower, have been working together to create jobs for women, children and refugees around the world.  Samasource is a social business that brings remote, computer-based work and digitized micro-work to educated low-income individuals in places like Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and the Dabaab refugee camps in Kenya.  “Micro-work” refers to small tasks that can be done with a computer with an Internet connection or a smartphone.  The organization, founded in 2008, has created 500 jobs and contracted $250,000 of work in the past year.  Additionally, the project uses an iPhone application called Give Work that allows volunteers to perform micro-tasks in conjunction with refugees.  The iPhone user donates her micropayment to the worker in Dabaab.

Generating Employment in Haiti through Social Business
Enter Mission 3646.  Samasource is now partnering with a local Haitian non-profit, called 1000 Jobs Haiti, to pursue an ambitious goal: to take the translation work temporarily being done from outside Haiti and transfer it over the long term to Haitians themselves, as a way to create jobs in the country.

I interviewed Leila Chirayath Jana, the CEO of Samasource, after she returned from Haiti this week.

Priya: You’ve just returned from Haiti, where you were conducting a training for 47 workers in digital work. In your work with Mission 4636, what do you see that would be necessary to scale up this work?

Leila: Our volunteers translate the text messages from French/Creole to English, geo-tag it on a map and then organizations on the ground respond.  For example, in one case a few weeks ago, we had assistance on site to help in delivering a baby within 10 minutes of receiving the text message. We’ve found that text messages are much more helpful than the current [communication] systems.  To scale this type of work, I think we would have to prove that this works as a crisis-management tool – that it’s both lower cost and more reliable than the current emergency services in countries other than Haiti.

Priya: Mission 4636 will have collected a great deal of valuable information about the Haitian crisis. What can be done with all of this information after the crisis is over?

Leila: There has been a huge push to ensure this data is collected.  We’ve been working with large data-based government providers.  With each incoming message, they will supplement the information on the ground to verify real places and businesses. The data we’re collecting is also incredibly useful later, for public health and epidemiological studies.

Priya: What advice do you have for our readers who are aspiring social entrepreneurs?

Leila: First, think about being a social entrepreneur in the same way you would think about being an entrepreneur. Make sure you’re responding to a new market need.  If there isn’t one, don’t go in.  We often tend to put ourselves into situations that just don’t make sense. Local people know the market best. My advice is to come in when you’re asked to come in to fulfill a specific need. Any time you’re working in a country, the relationship needs to be in partnership with local people. The nonprofits that do well, such as Kiva, are those that have recognized one specific need (the need for capital in this case), and work in partnership with individuals and small businesses all over the world to facilitate access. And, second, when working in conflict zones, go in with humility.

Afterthoughts
• Readers can donate work through Crowdflower to the ongoing projects as well as translate text messages from French/Creole on Mission 4636.
• Can projects like Samasource be scaled up, and what are the conditions under which scaling is likely to be successful?
• In what other ways can these creative new technologies be deployed to meet identified market needs in conflict and disaster-affected regions?

Priya Parker has worked in India, Africa and the US on peace-building and social-innovation. Photos courtesy of Leila Chirayath Jana.

This story originally appeared at the Ashoka Peace Blog

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