CIO EAST AFRICA
Date: 30.10.2015
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Crowdsource Africa's platform aiming
to combat unemployment
According to a report released by United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), Kenya faces a significant
unemployment problem that affects young people
especially hard. Youth unemployment rates are several
times higherthan the rates among adults and particularly
high in cities and among females. As young people grow up,
they stop depending on other people's income and become
independent. Duringtheirtransition from childhood to
adulthood, access to good jobs of acceptable quality is
essential foryouth to acquire independence from their
parents, brighten their prospects in the job market and
enhance their prospects of forming a family.
To help solve this age­old problem of unemployment,
Crowdsource Africa is leveraging technology to promote
crowdsourcing in Kenya and the whole of Africa. Crowd
sourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas,
or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of
people, and especially from an online community.
Crowdsource Africa thus brings together a pool of virtual
online human intelligence and scalable work force all over
Africa. The company creates a vast demand pool of online
workers that companies all over the world can tap into.
In an interview with CIO East Africa, Raphael Jerry, CEO,
Crowdsource Africa, said: "Crowd source Africa has been
up for two years now. Initially, we started as Crowdsource
Kenya but we have evolved because we see the demand has
been growing, so it is more of African brand now, so we are
forming what we call content distributers."
The company is attempting to brand Africa all over the world
as a culture ready crowd sourcing destination. It provides a
platform for international clients all over the world to access
a ready scalable and flexible standby workforce from all
parts of Africa. There is a big pool of intellectual bandwidth
in Africa, with an already existing freelance culture and
affordable internet in most urban areas.
Young people aged between 16 and 35 represent more
than 60 per cent of the continent's total population and
accountfor45 percent of the total laborforce. Unlike other
developing regions, sub­Saharan Africa's population is
becoming more youthful, with youth as a proportion of the
Ipsos Kenya ­ Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road ­ Lavington ­ Nairobi ­ Kenya
CIO EAST AFRICA
Date: 30.10.2015
Page 14,15
Article size: 790 cm2
ColumnCM: 175.55
AVE: 0.0
total population projected at over 75 per
cent by 2015, due to the high fertility rates
underlying the demographic momentum.
It is expected that this increase in the
number of young people ­ according to
us of service enablers. For Intel, how
A recent report by the FBI noted that the
they come in is we are creating relevance
for their products to be acquired," Jerry
a factor which led Crowdsource Africa
explained.
to step in a bid to protect users from
CrowdSource Africa comes from a
BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)
background with crowdsourcing being
like a hybrid of BPO. Most of the firm's
the Africa Economic Outlook report 2012­
2015 ­ will not decline before 20 years or
more. In Kenya, according to the World
Bank, youth employment is currently at 17
clients started from the brick and motor
per cent and 21 per cent employment rate
environment where most of the jobs they
were offering were being outsourced to
in Africa as a whole.
"As Crowdsource Africa we not only see
this as a gap but as a massive untapped
opportunity to empower youth all over
Africa with the necessary crowdsourcing
recourses that can grant them access to
the multi $billion crowdsourcing market,"
said Jerry.
"We are in low cost labor zones all over
the world. We have jobs for back office,
accountingjobs, production jobs and
people are even doing editing jobs for big
multinational media houses abroad and
you can imagine the same job in New York
would cost the employer fifteen dollars an
hour, so they are compelled to outsource."
Another thing that Crowdsource Africa is
taking advantage of, according to Jerry,
is scale as under the crowdsourcing
platform, something that would take six
months could take as little as three weeks,
because the job is taken as a big chunk
and broken down into small tasks and
vendors or Call Centres, but this method
of working with vendors had its own
limitations which can be detrimental to
task completion.
"You can imagine if there is a fiber cut to
the fiber that feeds Kenya with internet.
All ISPs go down so it does not matter
if you are usingten different ISP's as
backup, they all go down. So what these
clients are looking for is redundancy; so
that means if someone in Cape town,
someone in Nairobi, someone in Abuja,
all of them working simultaneously for
this client, then they guarantee this client
the redundancy, so they have continuous
business continuity," he stated.
CrowdSource Africa makes a difference
in trying to ensure that crowdsourcing is
seamless by playing the middle, in the
following ways; their clients provide the
work, Crowd Source Africa in turn analyzes
and formulates a customized deployment
plan, and finally they divide and distribute
outsourced to people online.
the work to their scalable on demand
This is so because crowdsourcing is
fragmented and distributed problem
workforce. Following this, the micro­tasks
are then handled by thousands of the
solving process. From complex business
processes to concepts and data­related
problems that are broken down into micro
tasks distributed to a group of people
online and completed efficiently by an on­
company's online workers who are spread
all over Africa, giving the clients the much­
demand scalable workforce.
Crowdsourcing is related to, but not
limited to, human­based computation,
which refers to the ways in which humans
and computers can work together to
solve problems. These two can be used
together to accomplish tasks. In Africa, the
unemployed might not be in a position
to either own or access expensive devices
with which to perform online tasks, a
problem which the company is doing its
bid to try and solve by partnering with
Intel.
needed redundancy and fast delivery.
Crowd source Africa is designed to address
the lack of a secure, trustworthy, scalable
and reliable source of online jobs and
structured trained scalable workforce for
their global clients.
The reality on the ground is that about
95 percent of the searched online jobs
available on ordinary search engines are
scams or potential scams and only 5 per
cent are legitimate. Out of 10 attempts,
only 1 may turn out to be legitimate.
Scammers are always requesting for
upfront payment or credit card details that
end up being misused once they fall into
the wrong hands.
industry loses up to $12milion annually,
such incidences by providing access to
legitimate clients that have been vetted
and are looking to hire freelancers from
Africa.
The company is also ensuring that
the freelancers they provide are also
legitimate. One of the ways they do this
is through a partnership with Safaricom
which helps CrowdSource Africa in its
authentication process.
According to Jerry, it costs a lot of money
for the company to allocate cloud work
stations. So Crowd Source Africa needed
to create a way of kilting spamming.
"During sign up, there is an activation
fee of Kshs 35. On paying that, Safaricom
will send us an API push which will now
trigger activation from our end, that
authenticates that you're that user and
the number you have put on the system
belongs to you, thereby helping us to filter
and ensure we do not have spammers,"
Jerry added.
Crowdsource Africa is currently available
in Kenya and Ghana but plans are under
way to open up in Tanzania, South Africa
and Angola. Jerry explained that: "For
most of these countries for us to open
up, we need to have an exclusive content
distributer in that territory who will then
handle our business there on our behalf."
At the end of the day, employment is
about making money. In regard to this,
Jerry explained that Crowdsource Africa
has a very direct mandate that they
defined for themselves, whereby they do
not handle payments; all they do is track
payments after which their clients pay
them a commission. The clients then pay
the freelancers directly either through wire
transfers or e­currency models.
"So if we talk about wire transfer of course
you have to have a dollar account or a
foreign currency account here locally, you
will give them the swift code they will be
wiring, the second option is e­currency,
things like; Paypal, Scroll, Money bookers,
so it depends on the client how do they
want to pay for you, so it is you to adapt to
them," Jerry concluded.
Ipsos Kenya ­ Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road ­ Lavington ­ Nairobi ­ Kenya