Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014, when Leila Janah was 31, and describes her in the present tense; the figures on Samasource’s impact and clients are 2014 data. Janah died in January 2020 at the age of 37.
Leila Janah has lifted more than 15,000 people out of extreme poverty, and she is only 31.
She has done it by creating her own nonprofit organization, but unlike other organizations of this kind, Leila has found a way to build a business with recurring revenue. Its clients include Google, Facebook, Wal-Mart…
Her organization has done far more for the poor than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although it has made far fewer headlines.
Get to know the philosophy of this beautiful, intelligent and philanthropic entrepreneur.
Leila Janah says her core values come from her father and brother, who taught her that all people are equally deserving of dignity and opportunity, since it is nothing but pure chance that you were born in a country with good schools, health care and enough to eat every day. Not everyone has those luxuries.
Her father instilled in her the belief that we should help the people who were less lucky in the lottery of where we are born.
When she was 17, Leila finished school and went to Ghana as a volunteer to teach English. Her parents had no money for that kind of trip, so she went on a scholarship. She arrived excited and convinced she could change the world, but in Ghana she ran into reality: although many people assume Ghanaians lack education and training, they are in fact better educated than people in the developed world, with advanced language skills and a surprisingly broad general knowledge.
The problem is that their education does them no good, because they have absolutely no decent job opportunities worth mentioning.
After a short stint at the World Bank, she quickly became disillusioned with its approach to development. She saw that the money ended up with governments and large institutions, and that all the talk of helping developing countries stayed exactly that: talk.
That was when Leila had an idea:
On one side there is the capitalist world, with companies that want to grow and get even richer; on the other, extremely poor villages with thousands of talented people and no work. Why not use the outsourcing model to fight poverty?
In 2007 she left her job to give shape to her idea and devote herself to it full time. She was determined, she says, to form a nonprofit that could take on outsourcing contracts and direct the work to people in need. That is how she founded Samasource, a business inspired by the work of Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and a pioneer of social business.
The basic concept behind this business idea is to apply fair-trade principles to the outsourcing industry and redirect a small share of the more than 200 billion spent on outsourcing toward qualified women and young people in developing countries.
The companies channeling significant revenue to this revolutionary idea include none other than Google, Facebook, Wal-Mart, LinkedIn, eBay, Eventbrite and Getty Images.
More than 15,000 people have escaped poverty by earning a fair wage from Samasource, as well as gaining opportunities for professional development.
She admits she has worked up to 16 hours a day to get this project off the ground and that it has not been easy, but the only way to change the world is to stop talking and get on with changing it. There is no other way.
We can measure entrepreneurs by many yardsticks, from the profits they generate to the products they create. But if we measure them by the real good they do for those most in need, Leila is probably the best entrepreneur on the planet today. And as if that were not enough, her company is fully profitable and still growing.
Further reading
Featured image: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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