Karya channels AI firms' data-annotation demand to rural Indian workers via a smartphone app, paying well above minimum wage. A J-PAL randomised trial found flexible home-based gig work tripled women's job take-up, from 15% to 48%.
48% vs 15%
Women's job take-up (flexible vs. office work)
200,000+
Workers onboarded (2021–2026)
$4.4 million
Wages distributed (2021–2026)
72%
Workers with no prior individual income
Details
Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Karya Inc.
Period
2021-ongoing
Keywords
gig economy, AI data annotation, digital literacy, financial inclusion
Context
Karya is a technology company that routes AI firms' demand for data annotation, transcription, translation and evaluation to workers in rural India through a smartphone app, letting them complete paid tasks in their own time and paying well above minimum wage.
Results
An independent J-PAL South Asia randomised controlled trial across 1,670 households in and around Kolkata found that offering women flexible, home-based digital work more than tripled job take-up, from 15% for a comparable office job to 48% for the flexible option; Karya's own reporting shows 72% of workers had no individual income before joining and 57% of top earners are women.
Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
app development and product team, task quality reviewers, local worker-onboarding partners
Conditions for success
partnering directly with AI firms that need data-annotation and transcription work done
designing short, flexible, home-based tasks accessible from a basic smartphone
paying well above the local minimum wage to make the work attractive relative to formal alternatives
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Data sources
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
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