Bangalore based startup wants to build social networking site for the poor. babajob.com and babalife.com are both the brainchild of Sean Blagsvedt.  Sean is originally from the US, worked for Microsoft in Redmond and then in Bangalore India.  He got the idea for starting a social networking site for the poor when he heard from the noted Duke University economist Anirudh Krishna, who found that many poor Indians stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover better jobs.  In a poor nation like India where majority of people, who live in an informal economy, get the temporary jobs by word of mouth i.e. their existing network. 

babajob.com (Sean calls it LinkedIn for the Villages!) and babalife.com (which is like Facebook for the poor) can be successfully used to help expand the network of millions of cooks, maids, construction workers, drivers, and others. How can one create a social network for the target audience where very few are literate let alone computer savvy? That’s the challenge that Babajob faces.  But, their model — pay people who help the poor find jobs, looks promising.  This is a perfect confluence of Altruism and Capitalism and can be successfully used to alleviate poverty at a faster rate.  The same model can be applied to other countries in South Asia as well as Africa and Latin America.  Currently babajob.com and babalife.org offer services only to the surrounding areas of Bangalore.  The plan is to eventually expand to the rest of India soon and then to the entire world.

Read more at International Herald Tribune’s article Internet revolution reaches India’s poor.

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