The NY Times printed an interesting article about how the stark poverty in India is actually inspiring rather innovative ideas that are leading to inventions that one wouldn’t visualize as possible or even necessary in a developed country. It also describes a LinkedIn-esque professional networking website called “Babajob” that could potentially help the multitude of poor people in India seeking better jobs. This could have particularly interesting and far-reaching consequences in other developing countries where most of the poor and underclass remain so only because of the inability to find suitable stable employment. Of course the most intriguing part of all this is how they were able to work around the fact that most of their target audience is not computer-literate. Or even literate for that matter.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I am happy to see this article was posted.
In addition to Anita's comments, it is interesting to note that they compensate people who assist those who cannot sign up on their own (i.e. don't have a computer, illiterate, etc). this interview with the CEO provides some more details.
Adding to this discussion I just read this study on the net which talks more about Internet revolution reaching India’s poor. Babajob is one such step of using ICT to revolutionize the way we use the World Wide Web (WWW)...
http://dusteye.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/
internet-revolution-reaches-indias-poor/
I've blogged about this today at http://blog.laborfair.com. This is such an exciting development and puts on the map what our social enterprise, www.laborfair.com, is doing in this country for over two years using technology and the non-profit and for-profit sector. We have built a online marketplace for household services that brings people to people connection around the fair and living wage. For the non-computer literate or those with limited access in the US, we work with non-profit worker centers as our "intermediaries" to help put the most disadvantaged workers in front of fair-paying employers.
Oh by the way, this is the link I was mentioning above,
living fair
Post a Comment