Leila Chi­ray­ath Janah is the founder of Sama­source, an award-winning social busi­ness that con­nects peo­ple liv­ing in poverty to microwork — small, computer-based tasks that build skills and gen­er­ate life-changing income. Janah is a fre­quent speaker on social entre­pre­neur­ship and tech­nol­ogy, and her work has been pro­filed by CBS, CNN, NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Sci­en­tist. She serves on the board of the non-profit Tech­Soup Global and as an advi­sor to mobile shop­ping app Spree­tales. She received the World Tech­nol­ogy Award for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship in 2010, and in 2009 was named one of Fast Company’s Most Inno­v­a­tive Women in Tech.

Prior to Sama­source, Janah was a found­ing Direc­tor of  Incen­tives for Global Health, an ini­tia­tive to increase R&D spend­ing on dis­eases of the poor, and a man­age­ment con­sul­tant at Katzen­bach Part­ners (now Booz & Co.). She has also worked at the World Bank and as a travel writer for Let’s Go in Mozam­bique, Brazil, and Borneo.

Janah was a Vis­it­ing Scholar with the Stan­ford Pro­gram on Global Jus­tice and Aus­tralian National University’s Cen­ter for Applied Phi­los­o­phy and Pub­lic Ethics. She received a BA from Har­vard and lives in San Francisco.

Can you tell us a lit­tle bit about Sama­source and what inspired you to start it?

I founded Sama­source in 2008 to reduce poverty among poor women and youth by giv­ing them dig­ni­fied work. Inspired by entre­pre­neurs I had met in Kenya the year before, and by expe­ri­ences I had as a man­age­ment con­sul­tant work­ing in the global ser­vices sec­tor, I engi­neered the idea of send­ing microwork — small, web-based tasks like enhanc­ing or ver­i­fy­ing data, images, and text –to peo­ple who live on less than three dol­lars a day in poor parts of the world. Sama­source employs this work­force in 16 work cen­ters around the world, pro­vid­ing a web plat­form that we built in-house, train­ing for work­ers, and a lot of work qual­ity man­age­ment and feed­back. Our team in San Fran­cisco runs sales, inter­na­tional oper­a­tions, and engi­neer­ing, and oper­ates much like a typ­i­cal startup. To date, Sama­source has pro­vided work to more than 1,500 peo­ple liv­ing in India, Haiti, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa and dis­trib­uted over one mil­lion US dol­lars in worker pay­ments to the field.

I first vis­ited Africa when I was sev­en­teen to vol­un­teer at a school for blind in Ghana. There, I quickly learned that many of the ideas I had about poverty were wrong— I found that peo­ple are poor because they are dis­con­nected from global mar­kets.  In Ghana, this was man­i­fested directly in a lack of good, qual­ity jobs avail­able to bright young peo­ple.  Most of my stu­dents wanted to leave Ghana for no other rea­son than to find decent work.

I believe that the best soci­eties are the ones that pro­mote the hard­est work­ing and bright­est peo­ple.  After Ghana, I felt that my life’s pur­pose was to level the play­ing field for work. I feel that even more strongly now.  I think we have a duty, as peo­ple who live in a rel­a­tively wealthy coun­try, to free up all of this tal­ent wait­ing in the wings and ready to par­tic­i­pate in the global econ­omy. We have to con­nect that tal­ent to gen­uine opportunity.

The idea of Sama­source really came together a few years later in 2007 when I was in Kenya on a safari. I got bored vaca­tion­ing and con­vinced a local busi­ness incu­ba­tor to con­nect me to some local entre­pre­neurs in the emerg­ing tech space in Nairobi. I met almost 50 who were start­ing small com­pa­nies that could do data entry, web min­ing, and other basic tasks. The entre­pre­neurs told me that their great­est chal­lenge was find­ing enough con­tracts for employ­ment.  I asked them how some­one like me might be valu­able to them. “Go out and find us work. You can sell our ser­vices”, they said.

Out­sourc­ing deals are typ­i­cally won on golf courses and in the board­rooms and bars of big Euro­pean and Amer­i­can cities. These Kenyan entre­pre­neurs were totally dis­con­nected from global mar­kets, but will­ing and able to work.

Can you tell us a story of how the Sama­source plat­form was suc­cess­fully used?

In 2009, we began build­ing a deliv­ery cen­ter in Haiti using low-cost net­books and satel­lite con­nec­tiv­ity, on the back of our tech plat­form. Haitians live in a densely pop­u­lated coun­try (10 mil­lion peo­ple on an island smaller than Mary­land), learn French and Eng­lish at school, share a time zone with New York, and live a short, cheap flight away from Miami – all this makes them great can­di­dates for dig­i­tal work. In a region where the chief eco­nomic activ­ity is sub­sis­tence farm­ing and 80% of the pop­u­la­tion lives in poverty, the type of work Sama­source offers could make a dra­matic impact. Fifty-three per­cent of Haitians are lit­er­ate. By the most con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate, that leaves about a mil­lion peo­ple as poten­tial Sama­source workers.

When the coun­try was rocked by a mas­sive earth­quake on Jan­u­ary 12th, 2010, it became clear that Samasource’s work in Haiti would become an impor­tant part of the country’s recon­struc­tion, and we moved ahead with great urgency.  Work­ing with a part­ner on the ground, we main­tained Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity in Mire­bal­ais and pro­vided microwork oppor­tu­ni­ties to peo­ple who had lost their liveli­hoods. Today, Sama­source has trained forty work­ers in Haiti who now have employ­ment and a grow­ing set of skills. Most impor­tantly, they have hope for the future.

What’s the largest chal­lenge in bring­ing dig­i­tal work to rural com­mu­ni­ties in the devel­op­ing world?

My vision is that Sama­source oper­ates on a busi­ness model that ben­e­fits both our clients and our work­ers by offer­ing a qual­i­fied dis­trib­uted pool of labor that is well edu­cated, trained and moti­vated.  Because we focus on work that requires some mea­sure of exper­tise and ded­i­ca­tion, our biggest chal­lenges are design­ing the micro tasks smartly and giv­ing peo­ple the right and effec­tive train­ing. We stay on top of this by employ­ing a ded­i­cated work­force man­aged by strong local lead­ers who pro­vide qual­ity con­trol and exten­sive train­ing in local work centers.

One chal­lenge to the work that Sama­source does is the fact that jobs that could be done by work­ers here in the US are being out­sourced to work­ers abroad. How do you respond to indi­vid­u­als that chal­lenge Samasource’s mis­sion on those grounds?

Before going to Africa, I started my career in global jus­tice work­ing on edu­ca­tional equity for the ACLU in Ingle­wood, a neigh­bor­hood close to where I went to high school. There are def­i­nitely impor­tant bat­tles to be fought here in Amer­ica, and we’re actu­ally in the midst of brain­storm­ing ways to bring Samasource’s model to the US.

In terms of our global work, I would respond by say­ing that Sama­source is not dis­plac­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for Amer­i­cans, but rather expand­ing what busi­nesses can do with a lim­ited bud­get. Min­i­mum wages in the US start at over $5 per hour, but the work we do tend to be lower-skill tasks that don’t make sense to do at that cost – it would put most of our clients out of busi­ness. Mov­ing this work to lower-cost loca­tions is the only option for our clients to main­tain prices Amer­i­cans can afford. Most of our clients choose Sama­source over other off­shore providers, not Amer­i­can work­ers — given that its already a part of the sup­ply chain, we’re gen­er­ally com­pet­ing with large, for-profit out­sourc­ing firms in big cities in India and China. These firms have gen­er­ated seven bil­lion­aires in the last 20 years. These com­pa­nies don’t recruit mar­gin­al­ized women and youth, and do not guar­an­tee liv­ing wages to their work­ers. Because of their high attri­tion rates, we also tend to out­per­form them on qual­ity. So I think what we do is a win-win for Amer­i­can busi­nesses and for poor women and youth who des­per­ately need a chance.

What’s the vision for Sama­source for the next 5 years?

To date, we have dis­trib­uted over one mil­lion US dol­lars in microwork wages since our found­ing.   We have a global capac­ity of close to 2000 work­ers.  Look­ing to the future, we aim to scale and take work to tens of thou­sands of work­ers in the next five years. Once Sama­source really takes off, I envi­sion build­ing a fam­ily of “Sama” social busi­nesses, all focused on using tech­nol­ogy to drive social change.

How can our read­ers help you push for­ward your mission?

Read­ers can sup­port Samasource’s efforts in Haiti and world­wide by giv­ing work or donat­ing through our web­site. We also accept qual­i­fied vol­un­teers for projects that require a min­i­mum com­mit­ment of a few hours a week. If you’re inter­ested, please email us at info@samasource.org. You can also fol­low us on Twit­ter (@Samasource) and Like us on Face­book (facebook.com/Samasource).

Orig­i­nally pub­lished on Care2. 

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