Impact Hub is an online marketplace for socially responsible outsourcing. Through Impact Hub, small and medium companies can easily connect with socially conscious outsourcing firms that ethically employ workers and invest in poor communities. The startup connects enterprises with 30+ service providers in five countries (in Africa and rural India) to help them meet cost objectives and easily migrate responsibilities abroad. Impact sourcing is a kind of outsourcing that focuses on providing work to disadvantaged people in areas of severely low employment. It aims to provide jobs to those who live in parts of the world where access to secondary or tertiary education is severely limited or nonexistent, as well as to educated people who live in communities with extremely high unemployment. While Impact Hub is NOT in the business of helping companies find people to work on code or app development, the services that it does aim to find people for are indeed things that startups need. At Impact Hub, the focus is on helping enterprises outsource their digital work to rural India and parts of Africa (like Kenya and Ghana), where there’s a lot of innovation and motivation, but with little opportunity, especially for women and youth. There is no exportation of physical labor (for which many Americans have an issue) and the kinds of Internet work Impact Hub focuses one are those that developing communities are capable of and require little technical skill. So, services like big data management (database categorization, management), online research (market research, data gathering), and content management (with regards to keeping all content organized on the Cloud). According to the Rockefeller Foundation, incomes for young people in African nations can increase between 40 percent and 200 percent because of impact sourcing opportunities. Additionally, it notes that utilizing such impact sourcing services actually costs enterprises 40 percent less than otherwise. When it’s both cheaper to utilize and provides opportunities to people who would otherwise have nothing, the question really boils down to: why isn’t your startup impact sourcing? Most recently, Impact Hub was featured at Tech Cocktail’s DC Mixer & Startup Showcase.
