Project Details
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FormEarn
Project description
Paying people for their answers, in a market where nobody was
The Challenge
Research participation in Nigeria is usually unpaid and often extractive: a student fills in a questionnaire for a project they never hear about again, and researchers struggle to find respondents whose profile actually matches what they are studying.
Incentives change the data. Paying for answers invites people to answer for the money, so the design has to reward participation without becoming a way to buy a particular result — and it must not become a data-harvesting product wearing a research coat.
The Solution
Match researchers to participants by profile rather than broadcasting to everyone, and pay for completed participation rather than for answers. The ledger records what was completed and what it earned; the data stays with the researcher who commissioned it, and the platform is not the buyer.
Skills and deliverables
Features delivered
The hard part
Making that boundary real rather than a line in a policy. The platform must be structurally unable to sell the data it brokers, which means it never takes ownership of it in the first place.
The Impact
Designed and partly built: the participant profiles, the matching flow and the reward ledger. It is the most product-shaped work in this wave and the least finished, and the record says both.
