Leila Janah

The solution to poverty isn’t aid or donations. It’s access to fair employment at scale.

Leila Janah believed the world’s most untapped resource was the intellect of people in poverty.

She was born in upstate New York to Indian immigrant parents.

She grew up in Los Angeles, worked babysitting and tutoring jobs through high school, and won a scholarship that let her spend six months teaching in Ghana at age 17.

Her students were sharp and curious.

Some of them blind, but following BBC World News and asking deep questions about politics and culture.

They had the brains, the drive, and the work ethic.

The only thing they lacked was access.

At Harvard, she created her own major in African Development Studies and spent time on the ground in Mozambique, Senegal, and Rwanda.

Her big moment came while working in Mumbai, managing a call center as a young consultant.

One of her employees told her he took a rickshaw every day from Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums.

She looked around and realized none of the people in the surrounding neighborhoods were being hired.

So in 2008, she launched Samasource, one of the first companies built on the idea of “impact sourcing.”

Instead of giving donations, she gave training and jobs.

She taught workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India how to complete digital tasks like image tagging and AI data annotation, then connected them to big tech clients like Google, Microsoft, and Walmart.

Not charity.

Real contracts. Real work. Real income.

Samasource paid a living wage and offered programs in health, education, and professional development.

By 2020, the company had helped over 50,000 people lift themselves out of poverty.

Then critics accused her of “outsourcing” jobs away from the U.S.

So she launched Samaschool, a program designed to train low-income Americans for the gig economy.

Students learned digital literacy, freelancing skills, and how to land jobs online.

Then, in 2015, she co-founded LXMI, a luxury skincare brand built on ethical sourcing and social impact.

The key ingredient was Nilotica, a rare shea butter harvested by low-income women near the Nile River.

LXMI launched in over 300 Sephora stores and on QVC, with backing from Unilever Ventures and Reid Hoffman.

A third of her shares were pledged back to Sama.

By 2019, Samasource had raised a $14.8M Series A and was providing high-quality AI training data to 25% of the Fortune 50.

The mission never changed.

Her companies were built on a simple premise: if you can give someone a paycheck instead of a handout, you give them their future back.

In 2020, Leila Janah passed away from a rare form of cancer.
She was only 37.

But the systems she built, the jobs she created, and the people she empowered didn’t vanish with her.

Her work lives on, and continues to grow.