Could Outsourcing be a Social Business Venture?

This week’s readings help me to clarify which traits define a Leverage Nonprofit, Hybrid Nonprofit, and Social Business organizations. However, I think that Social Innovation field is moving and changing so fast that sometimes it is difficult to place experiences in one of these categories. Why do I say this?

Well, during this week I was thinking in an article that appeared last week in The Economist. I became interested in the case and I did a little bit more research about the mentioned company. The company’s name is txteagle. I classified txteagle according to the rules provided in Creating Succesful Business Models, actually it fits in the Social Business Cathegory.  Nevertheless, txteagle is different in its nature to the other examples provided as Social Business Enterprises. Let me explain you why.

Txteagle is different because is a kind of outsourcing company. The founder is Nathan Eagle. Nathan Eagle is a Phd graduated student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he spent some time in East Africa in 2006 teaching over cell phone programming.  Well, Mr. Eagle realized the potential cell phones had in developing countries and founded txteagle.

The potential he discovered was to employ poor people in simple and provisional jobs. Why in poor countries? Because there is a 4.6 billion of mobile phone users living in developing countries, and usually this poor people is unemployed, needs money and have a lot of time free.   The driving idea of txteagle is to enable mobile phone subscribers to earn smalls amounts of money by completing simple tasks for Corporations that pay them in airtime or with money.

What txteagle do?

A Corporation contract txteagle to get a job done. Txteagle breaks down this job into small simple tasks and send them to lots of impoverished individuals. Some examples: one person has the task of checking two street signs, he sends the information by text to txteagle, txteagle gathered it with other’s information, and then send them to a Satellite Navigation Corporation.  Another example, people in Kenya translates a couple of words into Kenyan dialect; then this information will serve companies as Nokia.  Another case, txteagle helped one media firm to monitor its television commercials across Africa; each time a person in rural areas watched a commercial, she texted txteagle.

At this point, it would be easy for txteagle to get into another kind of business, for example using his large pool of cell phones numbers, to sell advertising services from corporations, and probably they will do so for, we don’t know.

Txteagle is an interesting case because it is about outsourcing, which is different to the other types of social business we have seen in class. Txteagle is just the broker, the connection between a corporation and poor people, but we cannot reject they have a social mission.  The texteagle model could be replicated in many countries; it is successful from this point of view. Although, it does not provide a long term solution for poor people, because they can earn only small amounts of money, they cannot live one month only doing this. The jobs are temporal and irregular. So, how do we classify this experience? Do you think txteagle is a Social Innovation? Is it a Social Business Company? Or is only for profit?

These are the pages for txteagle and The Economist's article:

http://txteagle.com/
http://www.economist.com/node/17366137