Empowering the largest knowledge workforce on Earth.
The total amount of idle time literate, 
English speaking mobile phone subscribers have within the developing world is estimated to be more than 250,000,000 hours every day. Given high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, much of this population would greatly benefit from even an extra dollar per day. While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has successfully introduced “human intelligence tasks” that can be completed by individuals with a personal computer connected to the internet, txteagle is attempting to untether some of these tasks from the PC. This empowers the billions of mobile phone subscribers to earn small amounts of money by completing short tasks.
Ruth & Betty, Home-Maker / Village Phone Operator, Butare, Rwanda. Ruth is the mother of four and while she reads and writes English fluently, she hasn’t been able to find much work in her local village. She’d like to own a phone, but hasn’t been able to save up the money. Betty operates a village phone in Ruth’s village. By ‘renting’ the phone to Ruth for 50 cents/hour during off-peak times when Betty has no other customers, Ruth is able to complete 3 hours of transcription tasks – accumulating $7.50 into her savings account and $1.50 into Betty’s account. A couple of more sessions like that and Ruth will be able to afford her own phone!
David, Maasai Herdsman, Kisumu, Kenya. While David had been unable to complete formalized education, he, along with many of his Maasi peers, does own a mobile phone. David completes voice-tasks, helping Nokia train a speech recognition engine on his native Maasai dialect. When David wishes to complete a task, he ‘flashes’ the txteagle Asterisk box that calls him back, asking him to repeat specific key words and phrases. After 30 minutes of work, David has earned enough airtime to last him a week (assuming he doesn’t trade it again for another necklace to give to his new wife).
Sophie, Unemployed School Teacher, Kilifi, Kenya. Sophie is an active member of her local woman’s microfinance institute and understands the importance of savings. However, she rarely is able to make ends meet for her growing family and has no money to open a traditional savings account. Occasionally she is able to borrow her husband’s phone and uses it to begin earning small amounts of money by completing translation tasks for Nokia; texting back the correct translation to words such as “Address Book” in her mother-tongue, Giryama, she soon is on the road to accumulating her own savings.
Emmanuel, Recent high-school graduate (age 14), Mtwapa, Kenya. Emmanuel has just finished secondary school, but is unsure what to do next. He has a lot of time on his hands but he could really use money of his own. Emmanuel beings experimenting with the txteagle transcription tasks and finds that he gets fairly high accuracy scores. Now instead of spending his time loitering around the village with his peers, he’s riding a new bike he purchased with his savings.
The rural poor have the most to gain from our service. In urban areas, there are more opportunities for earning small amounts of money and for obtaining financial services. Our service extends those opportunities to rural areas -- and by requiring no money to open an account and to accumulate savings, we are serving the needs of the poor within these rural communities. We have built a mechanism that encourages people to save by introducing the concept of earning interest and enabling additional services (such as setting up direct debiting), once the money in their account reaches certain thresholds.
As txteagle grows, we will expand our service to people of even lower socioeconomic status. For individuals who cannot afford a phone, we are enabling a single phone to have multiple user accounts. As such, family members could each use their shared phone to create their own individual savings accounts. We are also engaged in talks with Grameen about offering task completion as an additional product for Village Phone operators to offer to local clients during times when the phone is going unused, as described in the Case Examples section above.
Many tasks, such as Nokia’s data collection effort to train a speech recognition engine on Kenya’s local languages, have no literacy requirements. However, increased education will lead to more and higher paying tasks, hopefully providing additional impetus for continued education.
Because of the nature of our relationship with the operators, we will be using their marketing channels to spread the word about txteagle. This is a fairly straightforward method of reaching most of the mobile phone subscribers in the country, as these ads can be located anywhere there is an airtime scratch card dealer. These pre-existing marketing channels will enable us to launch the service almost instantly countrywide. Because there is no additional infrastructure needed, once our service goes live, we should be able to provide our service to anyone who has access to a mobile phone on the operator’s network.
In Kenya, over 10 million Safaricom subscribers, along with everyone else who have access to a Safaricom phone, will now have an alternative savings solution. More than 25% of the subscribers became users of mPesa (mobile money transfer) within the first year of the product’s launch. If we assume 5% of Safaricom subscribers become active txteagle users and each works an average of 2 hours/day, this represents 1.2 billion dollars in annual revenue - increasing the country’s GDP by 17%. (This amount of work corresponds to completing about 10% of the year’s total medical transcription tasks.) Assuming 20% of these new earnings are saved, a total of 250 million dollars will now exist in five hundred thousand new savings accounts across the country.
It is not uncommon for villages to have only one community phone that is shared with everyone in the village. Villagers pay to use the phone when needed; however the phones are typically unused throughout most of the day. Together with Grameen Foundation and MTN in Uganda and Rwanda, we are exploring the potential of having the over 10,000 Village Phone Operators (VPOs) offer txteagle services. In this way the village phone can be utilized as a shared income generation tool during the times when there is not a demand for their standard voice call service. We envision that members of the community will schedule time slots with the VPO to complete txteagle tasks throughout the day. The VPO will keep track of the different users and compensate them based on their individual performance.
Additional information can be found on our FAQ.