Stanford-Funded Platform Connects Illiterate Workers With Employment Opportunities
The Stanford Graduate School of Business recently published an article about EasyJob, a specialized platform that uses audiovisual tools to “connect illiterate workers [in Pakistan] with employment opportunities” in an effort to “give people a leg up in their quests to earn better livings.”
According to a recent Brookings Report, technology may help vault “a majority of the world’s population” to “middle-class or wealthy households.” Yet about 780 million illiterate people around the world stand to remain on the sidelines of this revolution.
EasyJob was developed by Stanford alum Muhammad Mustafa with $110,000 in funding from Stanford’s Social Innovation Fellowship to address this very problem in Pakistan, where upwards of 70 percent of the “country’s rural poor are illiterate.”
He explains, “I have lived all my life in Pakistan, and there I witnessed abject poverty every day. I have seen generations of families trapped. But what is shocking is that the escape from poverty can be simpler than imagined.”
Before Mustafa settled on the combination of free Google icons and audio, Mustafa tried using pictures, each of which he found had some sort of distracting cultural baggage. EasyJob’s icons, which “applicants can click to connect to potential employers by phone,” identify the “type of labor required—such as gardening, working as a security guard or caregiving—and the length and hours of the engagement.”
Although the end game is to sell advertising space on the platform, businesses that currently use EasyJob “pay a fee of 5 percent of the ultimate value of the opportunity.”
According to the article, Islamabad’s paradoxical combination of thriving tech and abject poverty will enable Mustafa to develop and test out the software. “If it proves successful in his home country, he plans to expand the concept to other developing markets.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
