Impact sourcing

Impact sourcing, also known as socially responsible outsourcing, refers to an arm of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry that employs people at the base of the pyramid as workers. It is defined as employing socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals as principle workers in business process outsourcing centers to provide high-quality, information-based services to domestic and international clients. The traditional BPO sector is typically associated with high-end, high-contact functions like call centers, which require significant levels of education and language literacy. The Impact Sourcing sector focuses on utilizing workers from poor and vulnerable communities to perform functions with lower and moderate skill requirements such as scanning documents, data entry work, data verification and cleaning, video tagging, and microwork.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) refers to the outsourcing of certain business processes (i.e. informational and transaction services) to third-party service providers. This business has grown over the past two decades to a hundred billion-dollar sector that directly impacts both international trade and the global economy. Growth in the BPO sector has been driven by five mega-trends:

Growth is likely to continue because the majority of these drivers are unlikely to reverse. The global estimate for the BPO sector as high as $574 billion by 2015. Developing countries have particularly benefited from the growth of the BPO sector, generating exports and millions of jobs. Leading centers for BPO include India, the Philippines, China, and South Africa.

Impact Sourcing first evolved as a new sub-sector of the BPO industry in India as rising costs in urban centers forced many BPO companies to focus on higher end services such as voice. New BPO companies sprang up in rural India where they enjoyed both lower costs and attrition rates. Those BPOs, such as RuralShores, employed high school graduates and university students from agrarian, low-income families. In 2008, the South African government launched the Monyetla Work Readiness Program in which over 1,000 unemployed youth, mostly high school graduates, were trained for work in the country’s BPO sector; over 77% of the trainees found employment.

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