What happens after $1500?

Earn, Learn - Grow. Karya’s three step approach to sustainable economic growth for low income individuals!

For the past two years Karya has focused on bringing dignified, digital work to economically disadvantaged Indians across rural India. Our platform has provided individuals the opportunity to earn a minimum of INR 400/hr (USD 5/hr) through simple dataset generation tasks. These range from reading sentences in local languages, or annotating and labelling images and videos. Our model is flexible; allowing workers to work when they choose, and inclusive; all work can be done with minimal skilling and does not require access to the internet! Through this, we’ve enabled more than 32,000 rural Indians to gain critical supplementary income for themselves and to envision futures that look radically different from the lives of earlier generations. To turn these envisioned futures into reality, though, is a much harder task to accomplish; but it is one that we are acutely aware of.?

Understanding this was a pivotal moment for us. Research has shown us that combating generational poverty is not a problem to only be solved through finances alone, solutions must actively include supportive and growth structures if we are to truly create sustainable impact. This led to the development of Karya’s three-step approach to sustainable economic growth - Earn, Learn and Grow.??

Through Karya Earn, we will support each participant to earn $1500 through flexible, digital work opportunities. In India today, it can take the average low-income Indian seven generations to reach this benchmark of the lower-middle class (WEF, 2020). At the same time the 2022 ASER report estimates that almost 80% of households in rural India have smartphone access. We are committed to using this opportunity in India today, to making the $1500 milestone possible for our workers in under a year.?

While creating this level of economic impact has the potential to be transformative, it cannot be sustainable without additional support and guidance. This is why we are committed to continuing our engagement with each and every Karya participant for 5 years post-earnings through Karya Learn and Karya Grow. The development of these programs is a critical part of our holistic approach to livelihood generation. Poverty is a multidimensional problem that requires a multi-pronged solution for sustainable outcomes.?

Our research, and extensive discussions with our workers highlight two core areas of need and continued support - skilling and career development. This is backed up by the CMIE, whose report suggests that less than 5% of India’s workforce is formally skilled and, in 2022 almost 440 million rural Indians took themselves out of the formal economy because they did not have the adequate support and guidance to find relevant employment. We knew this was something we had to address, if we wanted to create sustainable pathways for Karya ecosystem participants.?

Karya Learn

The goal for Karya Learn is to be a catalyst for skilling across rural India. Through a mixture of research and partnerships, Karya Learn will bring multi-lingual, smartphone-based skilling opportunities to all Karya workers. We believe rural India is the key to fixing our 5% formal skilling challenge. By giving people access to the right skilling opportunities that are responsive to the realities of the Indian job market, we hope to support our participants to be as prepared and resilient as possible. In addition to developing our own content, our greater ambition is to be an amplifier and aggregator of the amazing professional development and skilling interventions across India today. Using our open-source app and platform as a foundation, we hope to bring skilling opportunities to millions of rural Indians in their native languages.?

While conceptualising Karya Learn, we became aware of the fact that earning a living often leaves low-income individuals with little time for learning, creating a paradox where the need for immediate income restricts the upward mobility that skilling could otherwise provide. This led us to seeing an incredible opportunity to employ what we call the learn-to-earn model. We believed that digital annotation work, particularly voice annotation, could become a method for disseminating knowledge. Instead of generating Indian language voice data composed of arbitrary sentences, we decided to instead have workers annotate specially crafted learning modules.?

This led to us conducting a study with 97 workers in Maharashtra, in collaboration with Microsoft Research India and the Parinaam Foundation, in which the intervention consisted of a specifically designed financial literacy curriculum delivered through the Karya platform. The content was presented through a series of story-based modules, each focusing on a key aspect of financial literacy. The results of this study were extremely encouraging, with participants exhibiting impressive average improvement of 40.23% in their financial literacy as a result of the digital work intervention.

These results have pushed us to pour our energies into piloting the Karya Learn platform before the end of 2023. While the learn-to-earn model will be our cornerstone in these early stages, we are adapting it to include tried and tested methods employed by successful skilling platforms such as testing, tracking learning metrics and gamification to ensure our participants have a truly holistic learning experience. Furthermore, we are also exploring working with partners who will be able to provide a variety of skilling courses that can be adapted to the Learn platform.

Karya Grow

After Earning, and then Learning, we need to ensure our participants have the opportunity to Grow and excel. The vision for Karya Grow is to create a platform where any Karya participant can learn how to prepare themselves for careers in the new 21st century job market. For many rural Indians, the formal job economy is not a familiar space - this, however, doesn’t mean that it should remain distant. Karya Grow is aiming to bridge the gap and create opportunities for inclusion for those that have traditionally been left underserved.?

Karya Grow will be a hub for career guidance and support. Post earning their $1500, and while upskilling through Learn, Grow will support participants in creating their career plans. Through a mixture of 1:1 career guidance, AI-based chatbots, community career workshops and job opportunities through our ecosystem, we hope for Karya Grow to be a true accelerant for our participants. We see Grow as being the supportive mechanism for Karya participants that will allow them to thrive in ways they identify for themselves. Karya Grow will actively provide each participant with 1 year of intensive 1:1 support, helping them all the way from identifying skilling areas to applying for (and hopefully receiving) their first job. But our involvement won’t stop there! We’re committed to being with our participants for the next 5 years post their earnings, giving them continuous support, mentorship and opportunities to support their sustainable social mobility.?

That’s why, this year, we’re conducting extensive research with each of our participant communities to uncover their aspirations, fears, desires and needs. Through understanding these, we will incorporate additional supportive features into the Grow model to ensure we are offering our participants end-to-end support.?

We envision Karya not just as a single platform, but an ecosystem. An ecosystem within which economically disadvantaged people are able to reap the benefits of not just our technologies, but also the expertise and knowledge of the numerous other organisations which are working towards social mobility. We want to commit ourselves to creating an environment where our participants can truly Earn, Learn and Grow.?

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This blog was written by Nidhi Kulkarni , Manager - Research & Social Mobility at Karya .

Keep up to date on Learn & Grow through our website: https://foundation.karya.in?