Empowering the largest knowledge workforce on Earth.
“When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get out of poverty in a couple of years.”
- Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient
Using the mobile phone to distribute tasks to workers, txteagle has created the largest knowledge labor market in existence; over 2 billion literate mobile phone users now have the ability to be matched with corporations needing knowledge work. Reaching such a mass pool of labor is only recently possible.
Distributing work on to phones to be completed by workers in the developing world is only recently possible. A combination of advances in technology and mobile phone adoption rates make this a reality.
Untapped Knowledge Labor Markets in the Developing World
In the words of Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “[r]ural poverty has in the past been defined almost by its isolation.” Poverty and isolation, however, should simply be viewed as just that; they should not be taken to imply that the individuals living in such condition lack the ability or willingness to participate in modern, knowledge-based tasks. The average world literacy rate is 84%, and countries even in the developing world are near this level. Over 80% of Kenya is literate. Mexico and China are over 90% literate. While educational systems in the developing world lag the industrialized world, they are most definitely present: to dismiss such labor pools from being able to participate in a global knowledge workforce is a mistake.
Until recently, the opportunity to tap into such developing world labor markets did not exist, for there was no way to communicate with them. The recent and rapid advance of mobile technology in such parts of the world, however, has changed that. Mobile technology is disruptive: large populations of the world are suddenly becoming available for remote work.
txteagle is committed to delivering to anyone with a mobile phone the opportunity to participate in knowledge-based work. With high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, many of the more than 2 billion mobile phone subscribers currently living in the developing world would benefit greatly from an extra dollar per day. While some of the tasks we deliver do require above average levels of education, some, such as image-sorting, do not even require literacy. In all cases, our goal is to provide economic incentives to do work well, and to acquire more knowledge and training in order to be available to complete more sophisticated tasks.
Adoption of New Wireless Technology in the Developing World
Over the past four years, wireless technology has been enthusiastically embraced and adopted by the developing world. As a recent special issue of The Economist explains, “[i]n places with bad roads, unreliable postal services, few trains and parlous landlines, mobile phones can substitute for travel, allow quicker and easier access to information on prices, enable traders to reach wider markets, boost entrepreneurship and generally make it easier to do business.”
Mobile phone technology is truly a revolutionary technology for the developing world, and one which has become widely adopted even amongst people who represent the bottom percentages of world income rates. According to The World Bank, wireless phone subscriptions have grown in the developing world from less than 200 million in 2000 to over 1 billion in 2006. Today, the number of people in the developing world with access to a mobile phone is estimated at 2 billion, and growth does not appear to be slowing down at all: China is advancing rapidly and already the largest market for mobile phones, India is adding the largest number of mobile phone subscribers each month, and Africa presently has the highest rate of new subscriber growth.
Three factors have been central to this explosive rate of adoption.
For many of our worker-users, their cell phone is their only technology purchase. In East Africa, where over 90% of the population live in an area with GSM reception, mobile phones are also expected to serve as flashlights, as music players and even as digital wallets. The mobile phone has become indispensible; it is not a luxury expense. Indeed, even day laborers require them: increasingly, such work is organized by SMS message. The txteagle platform extends the mobile phone very naturally into a way earn supplemental income as well.
Successful Introduction of Mobile Payments Platforms
For the industrialized world, the cellular network infrastructure represented an incremental change. For the developing world however, it represents the radical introduction of modern communication technology. One of the most exciting examples of the importance of this change is the increasing availability of electronic financial transactions in the developing world.
In the industrialized world, the availability of financial transactions – in the form of debit cards, credit cards, and checking accounts – is taken for granted. Adoption of new, mobile transaction methods has been sluggish at best. In contrast, the introduction of mobile payments to the developing world represents for many individuals the first introduction of any electronic payment method.
The Kenyan market has largely lead the way here, and with wild success; after just two years, Safaricom’s mobile payment platform M-PESA and Zain’s platform ZAP has collectively reached 20% of the country’s population. In its short history, M-PESA has already handled over Sh230 billion ($3 billion USD) in person-to-person transfers. A remarkable feat in a country where the average per capita GDP is about $450 USD! As a recent article by The Economist states, “Kenya’s success story has demonstrated mobile money’s potential, and its benefits are starting to be more widely appreciated.” Regulators previously opposed to mobile money are easing their stance, and developing-world operators who do not have mobile money solutions yet are scrambling to put plans for them in place.
While most corporations view the introduction of new mobile money platforms as an opportunity to sell products and extract payments, txteagle takes the opposite view: this is an opportunity to bring work to traditionally isolated individuals and pay them directly. Though not all mobile operators in emerging markets have payment platforms in place yet, most have plans to launch something soon. Furthermore, in those markets we cannot yet make direct payments, we can compensate individuals with airtime. Mobile subscriptions are pre-paid, and in small amounts, airtime compensation is comparable to cash: such payment can free up disposable income that otherwise would have gone to telecommunications purchases.