Overview

Most formal organizations in developing countries employ support staff for tasks such as housekeeping, security, maintenance, and transport. Many of these workers in India come from disadvantaged, often rural, backgrounds, have studied no further than high school, and earn $50-200 per month. They have few on-the-job opportunities to upgrade their skills or learn new ones, and often remain caught in a vicious cycle of low-income work.

Kelsa+ (meaning “Work+” in Kannada) is an initiative through which organizations in developing countries can increase digital literacy and skill development among such low-income workers, through the provision of an Internet-connected PC for the service staff’s free, unrestricted use when off duty. We are running a pilot of this initiative at our facility in Bangalore, through which the 35 workers employed as support staff at any given time have access to a dedicated, free-to-use, Internet-connected PC at the workplace.

Research

We have been tracking the usage of this resource by workers over the past 18 months, employing a number of qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection and analysis. We have found that it is not just that the facility is frequently used by a large share of workers, but that usage of the PC in such a shared environment, with peer support and institutionalized maintenance, leads to gains in individual workers’ basic digital literacy and related skills such as second-language (English) proficiency. In addition, we have seen preliminary gains in workers’ self-esteem and career opportunities.

Some of our early results and analyses are shared in the publications section below (please note that the project was previously referred to as the Office ‘Hole in the Wall’ study).

For updated results, please contact us at kelsap at microsoft dot com

Kelsa+ as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative

Given the positive results from the pilot run, it seems that Kelsa+ could be a meaningful Corporate Social Responsibility initiative undertaken by private corporations and institutions in emerging markets to inexpensively reach out to the low-income staff in their own offices.

The benefits to workers include:

· An increase in basic PC literacy, despite previous non-exposure, varying age and literacy levels

· Improved confidence, self-esteem, hope and workplace satisfaction

· Improved communication and skill build-up through access to learning material and peer support

The benefits to companies include:

· A demonstration that the company is values-driven, motivated by its mission for all its stakeholders to realize their potential

· Improved worker satisfaction and skill build-up

· Exponentially increasing the value of the networked economy as new participants join the digital community

To this end, we are interested in reaching out to other institutions interested in implementing Kelsa+ at their facility. We will help with the implementation of various components that go towards making a Kelsa+ project an effective resource. Contact us at kelsap at microsoft dot com to get Kelsa+ started at your office.

Case Study summaries

A housekeeping staff member with no prior PC exposure began using the PC for games, and internet video. A few months later, he created an email account, began using the Learn-English CDs available at the Kelsa+ PC, as well as various Office applications........ Read More

Related work

'Hole in the Wall' : The ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments on minimally-invasive-education for children run by NIIT since 1999

Ratan, Aishwarya and Savita Bailur. (2007) "Welfare, Agency and ICT for Development." Paper presented at the Second IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, December 15-16, 2007.

People involved

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, Udai Singh Pawar, Sean Blagsvedt, Sambit Satpathy, Thanuja Subramanian, Kentaro Toyama, Lilian Zia, Itamar Kimchi, Gautam Prasad