Microwork? What is that? Simply, it means small crowdsourced tasks that people can do when they have time and earn a little money for each task. World Bank believes that it has a lot of potential in Africa and as a result their infoDev-program just launched a global competition aiming to get ideas using microwork into the market and come up with new solutions for difficult challenges. The competition is organized in multiple phases and the first spot prizes of 1000 USD are awarded for ideas submitted already by February 10th.

Check out the details on the IdeasProject-website! There are so many challenges like this going on that we are planning to organize a session to bring people and teams together, brainstorm a bit and submit winning ideas like you did in Apps4Africa!

Here’s a short scoop of the challenge from the infoDev press release:

We are quite proud to launch m2Work, a global online competition aiming to tap the job-creation potential of mobile phones. In addition to a total of US$ 40,000 in cash prizes, the challenge offers business mentorship to entrepreneurs with good ideas for mobile microwork. Microwork refers to small digital tasks people can perform anywhere to supplement their income. … Currently, most microwork requires access to computers. m2Work aims to transfer micro tasks to mobile phones, which could have broad job creating potential given the five billion cellular phones in the developing world. m2Work is hosted by the World Bank’s infoDev and Nokia’s IdeasProject, and supported by UKaid and the government of Finland.