It’s Outsourcing! It’s Responsible!! It’s Outsourcing Responsibly!!!

It’s all about cutting costs. Big companies want to downsize and reduce costs by outsourcing departments. Midsized companies usually don’t have the budgets to hire, hence they are always on the lookout for people they can contract out assignments or projects to. The reasons why companies want to outsource are fairly straightforward. But the problem arises when companies want to outsource outside of the traditional model and bring some benefit back to perhaps a struggling ecosystem. Do a bit of social uplifting alongside running the business. Laila Churaayat Jana is the founder and CEO of Samasource. Laila also happens to be a visiting scholar of Stanford University.

Samasource is a social business that is based out of San Francisco, that works towards finding out-sourcing opportunities and employment for the economically marginalized but skillful constituents of the American society. Laila shares some thoughts about social businesses, Samasource and Pakistan. Social Businesses It is generally confusing to put the terms “social” and “business” together. How can a social welfare organization also be a business? Laila clarifies, “a social business is work that benefits or gives back to the society it is part of.” She goes on, “It reinvests money and resources above and beyond the cost of running it into the business and does not need to worry about making shareholders happy.” At its core, a social business is about self sufficiency and sustainability, so that the business can continue to be beneficial to the society. “People are realizing that a lot of business outfits have not been built in sustainable manner,” she elaborates. “These businesses absorb grant funds and then remain dependent on constant external support,” she says. And that’s something Laila kept in mind when she was setting up Samasource. “Our mission is to promote job creation among the skilled people who are economically marginalized. We practically identify small, promising BPO and technology companies, and look towards low income countries.” Pakistan is one such country that Laila was looking at during her recent trip.

The key people that need to be helped, according to Laila, are the low income segment. “We move our services to include people from marginalized community even in the wealthier countries,” she says. After all, Leila points out, poverty exists everywhere. Small Technology Companies Samasource works with small technology companies in low income countries and their operations are primarily in Kenya, rural India and Nepal. Firms in these areas are connected to US clients through the virtual market place Samasource provides. “What we’ve realized,” she points out, “is that there is a lot of emphasis on access to capital and finance for entrepreneurs. More recently, there has been an added emphasis on what the entrepreneurs do once they have launched their business and need to sell products.” Being marginalized means that these poor areas, and the firms in these areas have limited or no market access. “Because they don’t have the capacity to create the noise in the larger global operations, Samaasource provides them with the necessary support.” “We were initially really nervous about this venture,” she recalls the early days of her business. “I quit my job as a management consultant in December 2007 to do this full time. We launched our pilot project after conducting a feasibility study in Kenya in July 2008, and in the first four months or so, we were able to broker contracts on behalf of these firms,” she says.

Samasource has managed to generate almost $85,000 in business, and most of that has been due to the commitment of its volunteer sales force. Beyond Borders and Challenges One of the key challenges for Samasource remains to excite clients in the United States, where it does most of it business from, about Outsourcing. “Outsourcing is a 160 billion dollar industry worldwide. It has generated seven billionaires who are Indian, Chinese and American men and there is a perception that this business is not really benefiting the average Joe in America,” she points out. The path Samasource has taken to circumvent this perception is the path of Socially Responsible Outsourcing. “We are trying to develop social links and we believe that branding this way can emphasize the fact that outsourcing to small firms in very poor regions can have a great impact,” she says. Changing this perception has actually worked for Samasource. Laila faces a whole new challenge of making Samasource work in Pakistan. “Pakistan has a number of advantages that can make it a big market for BPO,” Laila says. “It has a surplus of skilled labor, and that is a big advantage.” But there’s a flip side for Pakistan that make companies struggle a bit more than they have to. “There is a high level of pursued risk of outsourcing to Pakistan, because of which large companies are very reluctant to migrate more or less part of there business to the country,” she points out.  Interestingly, this becomes something of an opportunity for smaller players handling piecemeal projects, thus decreasing the risk for the outsourcing company. Pakistani freelancers have managed to build a good reputation for themselves worldwide. “This is also true for larger companies. TRG, for example, has a team of 1100 people working in Pakistan with a large number of women. During the instability in the country last year, they did not have single client interruption and have had some very positive feedback from their clients,” she says. During her stay in Pakistan, Laila met with a number of young companies to get them involved in the vision Samasource has. “I am actually quite nervous about making promises that we might not be able to keep, but I remain clear on two things: one is that I am confident that we will be able to launch this new concept of Social responsible outsourcing, and at the same time, convince people that bringing jobs to a place like Pakistan can have a really a stabilizing influence,” she says. “I personally believe that there is no better way to address political instability than getting people jobs,” she adds emphatically. Laila believes that there will be a growing appetite for this sort of endeavor in the US. “With the Web, you can have complete globalization,” comments Laila. “There is no limit to what an individual or a small company can do here. I have talked to some really innovative firms surviving and building products that are considered innovative even in Silicon Valley,” she goes on. Laila reasons that if the information being accessed is the same both here and in Silicon Valley, then surely the output shouldn’t be all that different. Opportunities for the Bottom of the Pyramid? Pakistan hasn’t exactly been the most obvious choice for outsourcing, despite the trouble that’s been brewing in India. People don’t think of Pakistan as an alternate to what they have already been experiencing in the region. But the kind of work that Samasource is doing, has little to do with spillover work from the spoils of other countries in the region, and more to do with helping the ‘components’ that work the Outsourcing market, become more developed. A critical look at any country you see through the html code in a search engine and you’ll only be able to penetrate so much. By bringing a ‘freelance aggregator’ such as Laila’s organization, the market automatically becomes deeper and more opportunities can bring greater benefit to people all across the food chain. For more details, please visit www.samasource.com