Meet
the entrepreneur who has lifted 15,000 young people over the poverty line.
Not only is Leila Janah crazy
beautiful on the outside, it is her heart for those who live in poverty that
makes her even more beautiful. I
initially came across Leila’s story when I was researching social entrepreneurship
which is a serious passion of mine. Leila
is a social entrepreneur using technology and lean business methods to promote
social and economic justice. Leila is
the founder of the Nonprofit, Samasource, which takes on poverty by bringing
digital jobs to emerging markets. Samasource—the
name derives from sama, the Sanskrit word for equal.
Leila moved to Ghana as a
teenager and made friends with many of the locals, who couldn’t find reasonable
employment. After college, she joined an
elite management consulting firm, and was sent to Southeast Asia to work on a
project. In the bustling city of Mumbai,
she made the acquaintance of a man living in the slums, the site of the hit
indie flick Slumbdog Millionaire. “He
helped me realize that there were young people with secondary school education
living in poverty, who had the skill and will to work.”
Leila does not hail from a
privileged background, but has hustled her way to success. She did not have a nest egg to fall back on
when she quit her steady day job at her consulting firm. When she was trying to get Samasource off the
ground, she couldn’t afford health insurance and was earning less than $400 a
month. She slept on a friend’s futon in
San Francisco, and tutored over the weekends to make ends meet.
Indeed, starting a nonprofit is
not for the faint-hearted. “It’s a
slog,’ she remarks. “You have to be
resilient and in it for the long haul.”
Leila Janah didn’t launch Samasource to make it
rich. She did it to make a difference
and for this reason she is the first woman we chose to highlight.
Samasource creates living-wage
digital jobs for women and youths in emerging markets, including sub-Saharan
Africa, southern Asia and the Caribbean.
It collaborates with in-country partners to recruit prospective employees
and tackle client needs such as data augmentation, digital transcription, image
tagging for SEO and machine learning. On
average, Samasource workers more than double their incomes after only a few
months on the job, and 92 percent stay out of poverty after leaving the nonprofit.
In her interview for
Entrepreneur magazine in 2014, Janah said, “Something
has to be done about extreme poverty; it’s an abomination that half the world’s
population lives on $3 to $4 a day. It’s
disgusting to me. I couldn’t live with
myself if I didn’t do something about it.”
Janah traces the roots of her
activism to her extended family’s efforts to combat poverty in India.
“The more time I spent in developing
countries, and the more time I spent talking to poor people, I realized what
they want more than anything is a good job,” she says. “We spend billions on international aid
annually, but we don’t find ways to connect people to dignified work. I realized that if we don’t think about ways
to harness private capital to solve problems, we’re leaving large amounts of
money on the table and doing ourselves a disservice.”
Kudos to you, Leila, we are so impressed
with you!
I hope Leila inspires you as
much as she does me. If you take only one
thing away from learning about Leila, I hope that it is the fact that you don’t
have to create massive business to be inspiring, but that if you have a passion
for something that you will do something about it, such as Leila did. It’s never too late and you don’t have to
have an abundance of resources in front of you to do something about it…create
the opportunity and doing something NOW…don’t wait.
Read Leila’s
interview in Entrepreneur Magazine here.
Watch Leila speak
of her journey on this Ted Talk.
