iMerit is featured in a Business Fights Poverty report alongside global leaders like Unilever, Sodexo, and Twitter. The report focuses on how business models can be built and adapted to improve worker equality, health and wellbeing, without impacting business competitiveness, growth and profitability.
The guide shares numerous examples of how lead companies have made business models for decent work integral to their businesses, delivering value for themselves and their workers. It also identifies four big shifts that need to happen to ensure these examples move from the margins to the mainstream.iMerit’s model is featured as a good practice example for its inclusive employment policy.
Value created for the lead company and workers: iMerit provides innovative, competitively priced services whilst creating opportunities for women to access quality, technical work which they would typically be excluded from without higher education qualifications. By empowering workers with few opportunities and training them up, iMerit has succeeded in creating a stable and motivated workforce with a 95% retention rate. Workers benefit from dramatically increased incomes – up to three times higher. 60% of its employees in India have invested in installing a new sanitation system in their homes. They are also able to access healthcare and insurance.
Business model features: Rather than locating itself in urban centres with lots of qualified tech workers, iMerit chose to locate themselves primarily in rural India, where they employ and train over 50% women from low income backgrounds. Often with limited education, they are trained to “train” artificial intelligence software, for example, by undertaking detailed (pixel-level) analysis and data tweaking.
