Look Ma…Baba gave me a job !!!

In India, social networking has been only an urban youth phenomenon so far. In a country where illiteracy prevails, and the rich-poor, the urban-rural divide is as stark as it can get, thinking of social networking for the poor sounds unrealistic. May be it takes an outsider to do such a difficult task, may be because he is not aware of the tough problems lying ahead.

Sean Blagsvedt worked at Microsoft. While working on philanthropic efforts at Microsoft India, he found this stark social contrast. Many urban families are looking for good, trustworthy maids, drivers, chauffeurs and crib they don’t get one, whereas many unskilled laborers are desperately looking for some job. He decided to bridge this digital divide with Babajob, a rural version of LinkedIn. Conceptually all of this looks pretty simple, but operationally, it’s a challenge to bring internet to the local Laxmi or Latha, who can’t even read vernacular, let alone reading English or using computers. How are they tackling this problem? They pay (INR 200/-) anyone who registers the potential worker; may it be a net café owner, or an NGO, or another employer of the maid. The fees for posting a job is 500/-, but again there is a smart caveat here. They first charge 800/- from you, and only when you inform them whom you hired, they return 300/- out of it, so that they can pay 200/- to the mentor. Moreover the site is also available in Hindi and Kannada, and will be available in other languages as they expand to other cities. As expected, there are a few glitches with font and linguistics there, but they should clear up after a few releases. They have also thrown in a neat Google Maps integration to find maids in your specific area.

I was curious to see if there are any reviews by employers. That is how we make our decision, don’t we? If my cousin’s neighbor tells me about a maid who’s very neat, diligent and trustworthy, I would be ok with paying a bit more than someone unknown who steals money from the home and then vanishes (trust me it’s very common, at least in the city where I live). Having that kind of content will need a bit of maturity in the product. Right now, all these workers are probably doing their first job found through the site. Also, this kind of an initiative would require a lot of offline efforts to let potential workers and mentors know about this opportunity, and I am sure they are taking a lot of efforts in that direction. They have a job opening for “NGO Coordinator” along with regular developer profiles.

Very curious that they use the familiar match box image “Cheeta Fight” as an image placeholder, and honestly, I didn’t understand if there’s a specific pun in it.

As expected with any philanthropy oriented venture, Babajob is also getting a fair deal of publicity, right from NY Times. Being an ex-Microsoft must be helping a lot as well. They also have a “regular-web 2.0-photo-video-blogging” types social networkring site called babalife, the purpose and synergy of which, I honestly didn’t get.

Here is a slide show by Sean on Slideshare.

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- Sumedh