Scaling Jobs for the Poor: Reducing Poverty through the Impact Sourcing BPO Approach

Abstract

The best way to alleviate poverty is to increase the income of the poor by providing productive employment. A pragmatic approach is to focus on a sector of the economy that is employment intensive and growing rapidly. A good candidate is the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. Impact sourcing is a subset of the BPO sector that focuses on reducing poverty by providing jobs to the poor. While this sounds promising, impact sourcing has not delivered on the promise, at least not yet. We illustrate our argument using in-depth case studies of three of the largest impact sourcing service providers, and provide recommendations on how the impact sourcing sector can achieve greater social impact at scale.