Outsourcing data and IT Enabled Services can fight extreme poverty by educating and employing youth from impoverished areas of developing countries.
Jeremy Hockenstein of Digital Data Divide (DDD) shares how they have successfully educated and lifted over 1500 youth in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya into productive lives that are breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. DDD was founded in Cambodia when Jeremy and his friends, on a business trip, were impressed with the dichotomy between the progress of technology and the lack of jobs and resulting poverty. They founded DDD in 2001 in Phnom Penh to do data entry and digitize documents for organizations in the United States, recruiting and training Cambodian war refugees to do the work.
DDD is now an internationally acclaimed social enterprise recognized with the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and awards from the World Bank Development Marketplace, the IFC Grassroots Business Initiative and the Global Knowledge Partnership. DDD has even been profiled in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat as a “favorite example” of social entrepreneurship and initiative.
DDD creates jobs for youth living in poverty yet who are talented and ready to gain the skills and experience they need to lift themselves out of poverty. They identify and recruit disadvantaged youth who would not otherwise have access to good jobs or higher education. The students are trained and employed at a fair wage and provided scholarships to attend university. By focusing on high school grads who are motivated and intelligent, DDD assures that these students succeed with their educational goals and, in turn, help their families and communities through the resulting positive impact on the local economy.
Upon graduating, DDD alumni are ready to find high-skilled positions in which they can earn more than four times the average regional wage breaking the cycle of poverty that traps their families and giving family members the opportunity to attend school and raise the entire household’s standard of living. DDD currently employs more than 900 people across offices in Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya and has 500 alumni in Cambodia and Laos who have moved on into other jobs.
DDD is looking to expand services from data to more operations services such as adwords management, SEO services, social media management and into more industries including healthcare digitization. People who are interested or who have expertise in these areas should contact Jeremy@DigitalDataDivide.org.
You can hear more when Jeremy Hockenstein presents for the Eleos Foundation on September 5 in San Francisco and September 6 in Santa Barbara. Click here to get more information about The Eleos Foundation’s Fall 2012 Frontier of Impact Investing series.
View the video below to see how DDD is making a difference.
