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 Mobenzi gives hope
By Theo Boshoff
Here is some good news for the struggling masses out there who thought there’s no hope of finding work. Through the Mobenzi initiative, all you need is drive and a cellphone to generate income.
The Mobenzi initiative is a service that, together with a mobile software application and a cellphone, create business opportunities for underprivileged South Africans.
Through Mobenzi, jobs are created by someone distributing simple tasks to people, who then do the tasks or job by using their cellphones and a mobile application loaded on the phone and get paid when the job is done. These people are known as Mobenzi Agents.
 According to Clyral, the company that created Mobenzi, commercial tasks are sourced from companies that need to outsource certain data processing requirements requiring a real person’s interaction. For instance, analysing the sentiment of a Tweet, customer SMS or comment, the translation of text or transcription of audio.
Mark Fowles, a director and partner at Clyral, says: “Agents can do the tasks in their spare time, using their own phones, without the need for transport. And on the other side of the coin, Mobenzi is providing exciting opportunities for businesses in need of real human input.”
According to Fowles, the application has been tested on various makes and models of phones and can work on phones costing less than R500, making the capital investment for the Agent minimal.
Fowles explains that Agents earn credit for each task they complete, with the value dependant on the complexity of the task and the proficiency of the agent. Agents are also able to track, through the phone, how much they have earned and when they can expect to be paid out.
Offering employment to those in search of work and an income and providing a needed service to businesses sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it? And it might just be an answer to alleviating South Africa and the rest of the world’s unemployment and poverty woes.
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