Google.org awards $1M grant to non-profit Karya

Google.org on Tuesday announced it has awarded a $1 million grant to Karya, a non-profit that connects low-income communities globally to AI-powered earning and learning opportunities.

According to a statement, the grant will support the organisation's efforts to help community members access complex paid digital tasks with the support of a GenAI-powered multilingual chatbot for users with low digital literacy.

These would be accessible via smartphones and could tasks such as annotating data or providing feedback that improves performance of local language AI models, it added.

Karya will use the grant to design a digital skilling pathway, consisting of a research-based curriculum and an experience-focused rubric, and translating it into 10 major Indic languages. Leveraging GenAI, it will build a multilingual chatbot to provide real-time support for its app and web-based work platforms that provide access to AI-related digital tasks, the statement added. This will enable people across a range of digital competencies to avail of expanded economic opportunities in languages of their choice.

To build the multilingual chatbot, Karya will make its digital work platform accessible to partner organisations based in the African continent, conducting experience research before scaling it globally. An early prototype of the chatbot is already helping people in Ethiopia to create AI-related tasks in local languages, including Amharic, it said.

Karya will make the digital skilling pathway, as well as a report of its experience in developing the multilingual chatbot, freely and widely available to enable developers, technologists, non-profits, worker collectives and government bodies.

Alex Diaz, Head of AI for Social Good, Google.org said, “We are committed to seeing the transformative power of technology bring opportunity within everyone’s grasp. We have been deeply encouraged to see Karya share this commitment, and are now proud to support its new chapter in nurturing both aptitude and appetite as it uses AI to bring brings AI opportunities to underserved communities."

Manu Chopra, Co-founder and CEO, Karya added,"At Karya, we believe that low-income communities around the world are not only excellent beneficiaries of AI, but they are also excellent builders of AI. We want to use AI to bring earning and learning opportunities to low-income communities across the Global South."

The digital work opportunities facilitated by Karya over the last two years have enabled over 50,000 people in rural India, with approximately 90% representing marginalized communities, to access high-paying data annotation work that has supplemented their household incomes. Karya aims to bring AI-enabled economic opportunities to over 100,000 people by the end of this year.

The Google.org grant to Karya is the most recent step in Google’s growing commitment to building India’s AI-ready workforce, the press release stated. Last month, at the 10th edition of Google for India, Google launched AI Skills House, a new initiative to empower 10 million Indians with AI training, and announced a philanthropic grant of $4 million to Central Square Foundation to support awareness amongst five million students, educators and parents across India on the meaningful and responsible use of AI.