Leila Janah

More soon.

Finally had a chance to recap some of the topics from yesterday:

1. Job creation is key to peace, not just economic growth: Scott Gilmore of the Peace Dividend Trust (one of last night’s awardees) spoke about his success redirecting $400M of US military spending in Afghanistan to local businesses. Connie Duckworth of Arzu Rugs employs Afghan women to make high-quality products for global markets, using the same rationale.

2. The key to long-term development is in value chains that engage the poor. Andrew Youn’s One Acre Fund (another 2010 awardee) has connected 22,000 farm families to markets for their produce. Groups like Camfed are now involved in connecting poor women and girls not only to education, but also to jobs that engage these new skills.

3. Cultural norms can change from within. Organizations like Tostan have made strides against female genital cutting by working within African communities; Telapak applies the same principles to convince people to preserve their lands while finding sustainable ways to derive income from them.

There’s also some discussion around the New York Times piece critiquing big banks entering the microfinance space. My take? If organizations charge high interest rates but are structured as nonprofits, such as Nigeria’s Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO), we needn’t be concerned.For-profit banks with 85%+ interest rates are another story.

More soon!

I’m here at the 2010 Skoll World Forum thanks to Silicon Valley (Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee and president, funds the foundation that puts this on), so I thought it appropriate to kick off my official blogging at SWF with three technology trends that are crying out for adoption among social entrepreneurs:

1. Crowdsourcing —   85% of humanity is now literate, including masses of poor people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Moore’s Law makes it possible for them to connect to the rest of the world using increasingly cheap computers: $65 is the new $100 in the world of laptops. Most non-profits only leverage the developed-world crowd, and only for the purpose of fundraising. Why not think bigger? Innocentive harnesses the crowd to solve some of the world’s greatest R&D challenges through its website — there’s a lot we can learn from models like this one.

2. Game dynamics — Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010 last month on the rise of social gaming wowed the Valley. For too long, people have dismissed gaming as a passing fad. Those people are wrong. In the US, the Wii Fit alone accounted for over $1B in sales last year, and FarmVille, Zynga’s most popular Facebook game, has more users than Twitter. In Korea, social gaming (and the sale of virtual goods that social games enable — see #3 below) is now a $4B industry. There’s a lot we can learn here. Subtle competition encourages user engagement, which can be leveraged to encourage people to shop ethically, live healthier, and donate more.

3. Virtual Goods – When I describe Samasource’s interest in virtual goods, funders often give me quizzical looks: “What do virtual goods have to do with ending poverty?” they ask. Well, all those little virtual tractors people buy on FarmVille are part of a whopping $1.6 billion market in 2010. Fonkoze and FATEM, a Haitian charity that sponsors the facility for Samasource’s digital work center in Haiti, raised $3.2M on Zynga through the sale of virtual goods in just one month. Non-profits and social enterprises with strong brands should be tapping into this new source of income — if I can buy a virtual bottle of Coke in my favorite Facebook game, why can’t I build a virtual school, or buy a virtual care package? Causes, Facebook’s link to non-profits, retails those goods on Facebook, but there’s a lot more room for branded charity goods around the web.

Let’s see what the next two days hold.

We’re partnering with CrowdFlower to translate text messages for emergency relief efforts in Haiti, using local workers identified through our newest partner, 1,000 Jobs/Haiti.

This serves a dual purpose: disaster relief and economic development. Our hope is to ensure that some of the aid money going into the reconstruction effort supports Haitian workers directly, at a time when they could really use the extra  income. For the full story, check out a summary in the Huffington Post.

Sorry for the spammy post. Until we have a larger budget, I am forced to use blogging and social media to get us more funding. Please vote for Samasource at the Chase Community Giving Challenge. $25K is enough to fund training for 5 new service partners in Africa and South Asia. We’re frugal!

I’m reading Christakis and Fowler’s book Connected* while on the road for TEDIndia. It supports a point I make to donors a lot: that connectedness is a basic human need, more basic than food, water or shelter. Those of us who are lucky to live close to our friends and family often forget how important it is to be connected to the people we care about.

Samasource started working with refugees a few months ago, when I had the chance to visit Dadaab, Kenya, the largest refugee site in the world and home to more than 300,000 people living in abject poverty. CARE Kenya convinced a donor to install two computer labs with satellite access in Dadaab last year, which Samasource used to train refugees to do paying work for Silicon Valley companies.

The work is boring (see my post about virtual sweatshops, if you’re curious about this), but it has led to some cool unintended consequences. To wit: several refugees discovered Facebook because they now have a reason to spend time online. Which led to the following exchange on my Facebook wall (Paul Parach is a former Lost Boy who was forced to flee his village on foot at age 9 and has grown up in refugee camps):

This is amazing. Paul first used a computer a month before we met him, and now he’s connected via one degree to Mark Zuckerberg. It’s really hard for me to illustrate how important this is. People like Paul spend the tiny bit of cash they earn in the camp buying cell phone credit. Paul and the other 42 million refugees worldwide are desperate to be connected to the outside world, and Facebook and cell phones are the only way they can do that.

If anyone who reads this knows of good research about the psychological impact of isolation and/or social connectedness after long periods of isolation, please comment — we’re eager to use this as one of our impact metrics.

*using the Kindle app for iPhone; props to Lloyd Taylor of Netelder for making this possible on a social entrepreneur’s budget.