Give Work with your iPhone

With the free Give Work app for the iPhone, you can now help refugees in Kenya earn money by doing tasks like rating the “sentiment of a tweet.”

1. People (or companies) submit job requests — aka “cloud labor jobs” — to CrowdFlower, whose tagline is “get your job done by real people, instantly! 24/7.”

2. Refugees living in Dadaab, Kenya — like Paul — earn money by completing these tasks online through Samasource, a San Francisco-based non-profit training refugees in Dadaab. Their mission is to “reduce poverty by connecting women, youth, and other marginalized people to dignified, computer-based work.”

3. With the iPhone application Give Work, you — the “tech savvy people” — complete the same basic tasks that Paul completes, like rating the “sentiment of a tweet.” This work does two things, according to Samasource. First, it generates money to support the refugees during training. Each iPhone task has a point value. 5 points for 1 tomato. 10 points for 1 text message. 10,000 points for a large bag of wheat flour.

Second, it provides comparison data for improving training programs. Once a worker reaches “75% accuracy” she is graduated from training and connected to work.

Intrigued, I decided to rate the sentiment of bunch of tweets for 1 point. The task seemed like an odd marketing ploy, with many references to Starbucks and McDonalds. Most of the tweets were like this one.

I rated this one as “positive” because I use a mac.

Interested? Save yourself some time and just donate. Unless you want to rate this person’s wedding photos for 1 point.

HT: HuffPo and Causecast.org