Advances in technology and processing power has led to the mass proliferation of anything and everything under the ‘big data’ banner. Data can come from anywhere and anything, from shopping purchases to the weather. According to IBM, the world now creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data everyday, with 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone.
Despite its mass proliferation however, digital data is not unique to business, and can be used to make a positive social impact to improve the lives of people across the globe. There’s been notable progress in the last few years, with governments and not for profit organizations utilising data to make a difference. Increased connectivity, especially through smartphone and internet of things enabled devices is driving this growth. Gartner predicts the number of connected devices to soar from 3.7 billion in 2014 to 25 billion by 2020, providing an endless number of opportunities to better understand people, businesses and technology.
Non-governmental organisations and the third sector have more recently made significant progress. There now exists entire organizations dedicated to supporting social impact data projects. In the UK, for example, an organisation called DataKind is dedicated to pairing data science volunteers with other charities looking to better use and understand big data.
Growing data expertise is slowly filtering its way into the third sector, but the high cost of talent as a result of skills gaps has meant progress has been slow. One of the largest cancer charities in the UK, MacMillan Cancer Care is working with data that includes cancer registration and mortality rates in order to create a tool for hospital commissioners to better plan cancer care in specific locations.
As the amount of data grows though, it is inevitably producing a skills gap. Demand is higher than supply, which is where I believe the opportunity exists for social action.
When I visit Europe and the US, I hear about the digital skills gap and the hindrance it is posing to the continued growth of the data driven world. Coming from a farming community in the Indian state of Kerala, I understand these concerns, but my background has led me to see a rather different outlook. The solution to speeding up the proliferation of big data exists in the developing world.
Impact sourcing: socially responsible outsourcing is creating jobs across the global south, and has the potential to fill any gap. Social enterprises like Samasource are already connecting people living in poverty across rural areas to digital work.
I’ve seen first hand the immense digital talent existent in the developing world. Until recently, it has been left untapped. People living in these regions have been forced to narrow down work options to traditional jobs, strangling career dreams, and remaining in poverty. Driven by the proliferation of mobile, internet access is now providing digital job opportunities.
According to the GSMA in sub-saharan Africa alone, almost 40 percent of adults have access to a mobile device, and subsequently the internet. This growth is enabling organisations like Samasource to go into remote rural communities, provide some basic training and reliable income from digital work. The companies and charities in the US and Europe trying to hash digital teams together from a workforce that can’t keep up with growth, only need to look to the likes of rural India, the Philippines and Kenya for a solution.
The online and connected nature of big data means that it can be processed and accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. As part of efforts to create potential tech jobs in rural areas, my company, Corporate 360 has adopted an impact sourcing model. We opened a fully fledged data factory in Pathanapuram, a remote village in my homeland of Kerala, staffed by people from modest farming backgrounds. We now also employ more than 900 online data workers in the Philippines, Nepal, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Kenya providing a reliable income to people born into poverty.
Big data is going everywhere fast, and I see it as critical to driving social change in both the developed and developing world. The insight available to those that can make the most of it is almost endless, and charities and businesses alike should be looking to big data as a means to create social change, better support their work and make clearer data driven decisions.
