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Using AI to bring accelerated earning and learning opportunities to low-income communities everywhere

Reshaping economic opportunity for the excluded

For too long, access to economic opportunity has been determined by privilege. Language, gender, geography, and societal norms dictate who gets to participate in the modern economy.

Entire communities remain locked out of fair work — not because they lack capability, but because the system was never built for them.

Karya is changing that.

Our vision

Creating accelerated, transformative, dignified earning and learning opportunities for our communities

What we've done

120+

Language datasets created

20x

the Indian Minimum Wage paid to our workers

100,000+

Workers employed

28 states

in India, where Karya has worked

3 Countries

Where operations are currently active

Key areas of focus

The Digital Language Divide

India has over 19,000 dialects, yet fewer than 100 languages are digitally documented. With 197 endangered languages, the highest globally, many must abandon their mother tongues to access education, jobs, and even basic digital services.

Economic Exclusion

Over 204 million Indian women do not leave their homes daily —more than the total population of 190 countries. Societal restrictions, mobility constraints, and unpaid domestic labour prevent them from earning a dignified income.

Work Designed for the Few

Traditional job models exclude those in remote areas with low digital literacy, further widening economic disparities. The lack of accessible work opportunities forces many to migrate to urban centers in search of a livelihood, further straining resources and uprooting communities.

AI companies are spending billions on building datasets, often excluding the very communities they are building for.

Karya is here to change that.

A decentralized, inclusive model

Work in your language

Our platform supports 50+ Indian languages, ensuring AI and digital technologies reflect the people they serve.

Work from anywhere

Karya enables remote, low-digital-literacy users to access meaningful work without the need to migrate, commute, or step outside restrictive environments.

Fair & safe work

Karya upholds a strong ethical data chain. Workers own their data & earn royalties whenever it is used, ensuring that those historically excluded from economic opportunities retain a lasting stake in the value they create.

Karya is a smartphone-based, flexible data work platform designed for those historically excluded from economic opportunities. By shifting where work happens and who benefits from it, we are proving that economic participation can—and must—be redesigned.

Our work so far

Karya has brought dignified digital work to 100,000 people, many accessing fair wages for the first time. From every Indian state to Kenya and Ethiopia, we’ve seen lives change—women gaining independence, communities preserving their languages, and workers shaping AI. This is just the beginning, and we’re determined to do more.

Find out more in our 2024 report.

Worker Experiences

“With the money I earned [through Karya], I was able to pay my children’s school fees and even fulfil their wishes. If I get such an opportunity again in the future I will do the work very happily. I’m very thankful for this opportunity.”

Moumita Saha Das, 32, Kolkata

“I currently don’t have a job. I really benefited a lot due to this work. I was able to pay the bills for my home. I can use this money to pay for all the things I need this month, I don’t need to borrow money from anyone else. This work takes less time and energy than manual work, and the pay is much better. I now feel that I am capable of doing any new work. I didn’t feel like that before”

Anonymous

This is your Testimonial quote. Give your customers the stage to tell the world how great you are!

Jamie L.

Case studies & Research papers

Speaking in terms of Money

Two-week financial literacy program with low-income individuals in Wagholi, Pune

Read

Crowdsourcing Speech Data

Authors collected labelled speech data in the Marathi language from different low-income user groups

Read

JPAL Case Study

In a field experiment with 1,670 households in West Bengal, short-term data entry job were offered to women through Karya’s app with flexible work arrangements.

Read

Akal Badi ya Bias

Through field studies involving rural and low-income community women, we uncover diverse perceptions of gender bias, underscoring the necessity for context-specific approaches.

Read