New alliances
Humans in the Loop has a proven partnership model through which we are able to reach conflict-affected communities and provide them with access to dignified online work. Instead of using a crowdsourced or marketplace approach where users register as individual freelancers to work on our projects, we build alliances with organizations on the ground which are already working successfully with the same target group and which share the same mission.
Our partners provide us with invaluable support for the recruitment, training, and supervision of annotators, as well as the distribution of their payments. On our side, we are responsible for the business development, solution design and project management of paid annotation projects which their beneficiaries can participate in. This is a win-win situation for both organizations and it provides annotators with a strong support network.
Back in 2019 we established our first partnership with the Preemptive Love Coalition’s WorkWell program in Iraq. By the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 we created our second partnership: with the Roia Foundation and their social enterprise Turnsole, in Turkey and Syria. Today, we are proud to announce our newest official partner: Brightpoint.
Meet Brightpoint
BrightPoint is a Kabul-based entrepreneurial ecosystem builder with more than 6 years of direct contribution towards a thriving ecosystem for entrepreneurs and small businesses in Afghanistan. Through their coworking space Coworthy, they provide space for work and collaboration for professionals in the city, while through their impact investing platform Tamveel they support sustainable local impact. In addition, they are the implementing partner of Founder institute in Afghanistan and one of the first incubation programs and host a variety of events to connect entrepreneurs and stakeholders.
Thanks to this impressive track record, Brightpoint was identified as a trustworthy partner for Humans in the Loop in Afghanistan and in early 2021 we set up a pilot in Kabul. Using a train the trainer approach, Humans in the Loop prepared Brightpoint’s staff to deliver an introductory course in AI and computer vision annotation.
Brightpoint organized several training sessions and trained 14 annotators who also had the opportunity to work on a series of practical projects, including image tagging, bounding box annotation, and semantic segmentation.
More than 80% of Brightpoint’s annotators are female, most of whom are aged between 18 and 25. They work with university students and workers from the rural areas of the country, mostly displaced from conflict zones as Ghazni, Panjshir, Maidan Wardak, Parwan, Herat, and Farah.
After the successful completion of the pilot, Brightpoint has already started working on their first projects with Humans in the Loop. Despite severe challenges such as electricity cuts due to the destruction of electrical infrastructure, Brightpoint’s team is managing to deliver projects and to support their annotators with access to working space, internet, and equipment.
Stay tuned for more updates on our collaboration and on the expansion of our partner network!