Doing Well by Doing Good

Jeremy Hockenstein, SM '99's data entry company in Cambodia hires Phnom Penh's poor and offers them the chance of a better life.

By Elizabeth Durant

01/01/2001

Last September, 10 women at the Cambodian Women's Crisis Shelter in Phnom Penh began a transformation that had previously been unthinkable. They came to the shelter to escape domestic abuse or prostitution and to rebuild their lives, but since they had few skills and little education, their chances of supporting themselves were slim. Fortunately, the shelter was partnered with Digital Divide Data, also based in Phnom Penh. The company hires Cambodia's poor and disabled to provide data entry services to universities, nonprofits, and corporate clients in the U.S. and Canada. Typically, its employees already have basic English and computer skills; these 10 women had neither. But that didn't stop social entrepreneur Jeremy Hockenstein, SM '99, the company's founder, from taking a chance on them. Within months, the women progressed from learning the ABCs on a chalkboard to typing 30 words per minute in English to achieving full employee status. Now they earn four times the national-average salary and have a lifeline to their future through the educational services the company continues to offer.

For Hockenstein, a soft-spoken 32-year-old from Montral, Qubec, launching the company fulfilled a long-held desire. "I've always felt like I was in a struggle to find work that was meaningful and challenging. I feel like my work has been a path to balance both those things," he explains.

The idea came to him during a consulting trip to Hong Kong in November 2000. On a whim, Hockenstein spent a weekend visiting the ancient Angkor temples in northwestern Cambodia. "While the temples were beautiful, I was struck by the people I met, and how there were Internet cafs on almost every corner. People really had the sense that computers and English were the key to their future," he says. It was an encouraging sign from a people whose past is marred by chronic political turmoil. From 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge regime claimed 1.7 million lives and dismantled the country's political, legal, economic, and social infrastructure. Civil war and political infighting continued until 1998, when a coalition government took hold.

Now, 36 percent of Cambodians live below the poverty line, and only 32 percent are literate. Hockenstein-whose mother was born in a Holocaust concentration camp-was stirred by a desire to help a culture devastated by genocide, despite the obstacles. He began drawing on his strategic-consulting experience, including several years at the management consulting firm McKinsey, and recruited a few friends with business, nonprofit, and social-work backgrounds to join him. They spent February 2001 in Phnom Penh, researching their options, and discovered that plenty of Cambodians had basic English and computer skills, thanks to training provided by local nonprofits. But there were virtually no jobs.

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The friends knew that a number of Western companies were already outsourcing data entry work to countries, such as India, with cheaper labor forces. They began scheming about how to attract similar investment to a country with limited infrastructure and less skilled workers. Moreover, they envisioned a data entry company that would provide not only jobs but educational programs that would offer employees opportunities for career advancement.

While his friends began recruiting and training Cambodian managers and locating a software vendor, Hockenstein returned to the United States to raise matching funds for the $25,000 his group had contributed itself-and to drum up business. He secured a $25,000 grant from the California-based Global Catalyst Foundation and got a $50,000 contract to digitize archived editions of the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper.