By FREDRICK OBURA
Unemployed persons from slum areas around Nairobi now have a reason to smile.
The Rockefeller Foundation and SAMSource wants to hire literate youth from these areas to work for giant companies such as LinkedIn, Intuit, the US State Department, and local hospitals, among others.
SAMSource – a non-profit organisation based in the US is working with Techno Brain – a local business processing and outsourcing company – to create jobs in data entry, content moderation and other outsourcing jobs to hundreds of Kenyans from poor families.
“The project we are in with SAMSource is about creating jobs to the youth from slum around Nairobi. We target those with IT skills that can help us do certain tasks for American companies,” says Lakshman Manickam, Director Operations and Human Resource at Techno Brain.
“SAMSource will bid for the contracts in the US and we will execute the tasks remotely from our offices here in Kenya. The work mostly involves ordinary outsourcing duties such as data entry, verification of contents on client’s websites, and high quality content moderation, over 100 people has been employed to carry out the tasks,” he says.
Unemployment
In an interview during her visit to Kenya, SAMSource Chief Operating Officer, Chelsea Cooper, said the youth initiative was prompted by the increasing rate of unemployment among educated youth in the country.
“These groups are able to perform tasks like web verification, data entry to companies like Google and e-bay, we are here to help link the two,” she said.
She said about 90 individuals in rural areas in Ugenya and Karachuonyo constituencies will also get computer training.
“There are a lot of opportunities in the developed world. Many companies now want to digitise most of their operations and are looking for affordable labour,” she said.
Digitisation
