Leila Janah went to Ghana to teach English. One of her students was reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Others could name American senators. They followed the BBC and Voice of America. The young American had arrived with a scholarship, an appetite for adventure and some assumptions that her students proceeded to dismantle.
She had finished high school early and persuaded a scholarship committee to let her spend six months volunteering abroad. Years later, she described her motives with disarming candor: she wanted to leave home and have an adventure. The grand theory of social enterprise came afterward. First came the awkward discovery that the people she had imagined helping already possessed abilities she had underestimated.
What troubled her was the gap between what those students could do and what their circumstances allowed them to earn. A capable person could remain poor without ever having had a fair chance to compete. That observation became the question she carried through university, consulting and eventually her own businesses: how could someone connect that ability to a paying customer?
no human’s fate should be determined by an accident of birth.
Leila Janah · 2013
02 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSA rickshaw ride into the global economy
Janah was born in Lewiston, New York, in 1982 and grew up in San Pedro, Los Angeles, the daughter of Indian immigrants. She babysat and tutored as a teenager. At Harvard, where she graduated in 2004 with a degree in development studies, she explored poverty through fieldwork and a stint with the World Bank. She also researched and wrote travel guides. Her education involved a fair amount of leaving campus.
After graduation she joined the consulting firm Katzenbach Partners. An assignment took her to a Mumbai call center, where she met an employee who commuted from Dharavi. Each day, he traveled from a neighborhood associated with deprivation into a workplace serving customers overseas. His address told one story about his prospects; his actual work told another.
Outsourcing had already demonstrated that a customer and a worker could be separated by thousands of miles. Janah wondered how deliberately that separation could be used to widen access to employment. If companies could send work across borders, perhaps they could send it across the less visible boundary between people considered employable and people considered charity cases.
03 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSThe unglamorous business of a first customer
Samasource began in 2008. Its name drew on sama, Sanskrit for equal. The early proposition involved finding digital tasks that people in low-income communities could learn to perform, then connecting them to organizations that needed the work completed. A philanthropic mission still required someone to buy something.
Janah’s account of the beginning was refreshingly practical. She traveled to Kenya to find a local partner, rented a small office back in the United States and made a brochure on her Mac. She printed it at Kinko’s. The first contract, worth $30,000, involved reviewing book transcripts for Bookshare. She personally guaranteed the quality. That promise translated into late nights checking the work herself.
The distance between an idea and an invoice can be longer than the flight to Nairobi. Janah kept looking for customers and people who could help. She even approached Reid Hoffman through LinkedIn and received a reply. The technology industry’s networks mattered, but so did the willingness to ask a stranger a concrete question. A useful contact was somebody who might help turn the next proposal into paid work.
The first contract / 2008Book transcripts, a personal quality guarantee, and a business beginning to take shape.
04 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSA purchasing decision with another consequence
Janah called the approach socially responsible outsourcing; impact sourcing became the wider term. The mechanism was straightforward. A company already had a budget for a service. A supplier competed for that contract while deliberately recruiting people with limited employment opportunities and committing to decent pay. The customer’s purchase would help finance recruitment, training and wages.
That moved the argument into a rather ordinary corporate setting: the purchasing department. Janah wanted social consequences considered alongside cost and quality when a business selected a vendor. It was an invitation to examine money already being spent, including the less glamorous money that never appeared in an annual charity photograph.
In 2014, she received the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment. The award recognized the application of fair trade principles to outsourcing. Her idea was becoming legible to institutions beyond the startup circuit. Yet the underlying test remained personal and specific: did access to work change what someone could afford and what they could do next?
Her 2017 book, Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time, assembled that argument for a broader audience. It brought together workers’ experiences, business experiments and the proposition that an earned income gives people more control over their own decisions. The subtitle kept the unit of change modest enough to picture: a job.
05 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSHow the jobs became part of AI
The work itself changed. Samasource moved from basic digital processing toward the annotation of images and other data used to train machine learning systems. Janah described the evolution as a decade of responding to customers. A meeting with a Microsoft AI leader in 2011 helped open that path; a project followed the next year.
In December 2018, she reported that more than 75 percent of the company’s 2,500 agents were working on AI training inputs. Those figures describe that moment in the business. They also reveal something easily lost in discussions of artificial intelligence: people had to make judgments about the material from which machines learned.
Her commercial argument linked stable employment to consistent quality. Training and retaining a worker could create expertise that a succession of interchangeable contractors would struggle to accumulate. She wanted employees to develop further, including into machine learning and data science. The ambition extended beyond obtaining an initial task to building a career.
Growth brought a financing decision. In November 2019, Samasource closed a $14.8 million Series A led by Ridge Ventures. The operating business had shifted to a for-profit structure, with the original nonprofit retaining an ownership stake. The arrangement was intended to bring in capital for expansion while maintaining a connection to the founding mission. It made the question of preserving that mission a matter of ownership as well as intention.
- Samasource begins with digital work.
- Samaschool focuses on skills and access.
- LXMI brings the sourcing idea to skincare.
- Give Work takes the argument into print.
- A $14.8m Series A finances the next stage.
06 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSAn angry message, then a different classroom
Janah’s argument traveled home, too. In interviews, she described how an angry message questioning her focus overseas helped prompt work on opportunity in the United States. The criticism became something to investigate. People facing barriers to employment were hardly confined to one side of an ocean.
Samaschool, launched in 2013, focused on digital literacy and the skills needed to find and manage independent work. It applied the broader idea to people navigating a changing labor market: access required knowledge of the systems through which work was being offered, alongside the ability to perform a task.
That emphasis made the school a different instrument from the outsourcing business. One organized paid projects; the other helped people prepare to pursue opportunities themselves. Janah kept adjusting the means while returning to the same concern about who could participate. The classroom she had encountered as a teenager had become a recurring business problem: learning needed a route to an income.
07 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSThe same question, in a jar
LXMI looked like a considerable change of subject. Founded in 2015, the skincare business grew from Janah’s encounter with Nilotica, a variety of shea from northern Uganda. It connected the harvesting and processing work of local women to a luxury consumer market. A software contract and a beauty purchase could, in her view, carry a similar obligation to the people supplying them.
She was interested in what shoppers could learn about a product’s origins and the earnings of its producers. Luxury, with its attention to provenance and experience, gave her another place to test the idea that a business could build fairer sourcing into its operating model. The customer would receive a product; the supplier would receive an order and payment.
There was a pleasing audacity in bringing an argument about wages to a beauty counter. Janah did not ask customers to abandon their interest in packaging or a pleasurable purchase. She wanted to connect that interest to the work behind the jar. Her larger aspiration was to change how companies spent money, opening more of their existing supply chains to people who had been excluded.
08 / THE GIVE WORK YEARSA founder with too many ideas
Janah could also be funny about the limits of being Janah. “My default setting is to create,” she said, admitting that focus was a struggle when travel kept introducing her to entrepreneurs and new ideas. The challenge was staying with the organizations she already had long enough to grow them.
Her tastes ran beyond a pitch deck. Asked for her favorite city, she chose Rio for samba, bossa nova and beaches. Evernote served as her combined brain, desk and journal. If she could pitch one person, she wanted a meeting with Melinda Gates. She admired the memoir West with the Night, by aviator Beryl Markham. Adventure and organization kept appearing in the same life, occasionally competing for room.
She was alert to the smaller ways people disappeared from professional view. At events, she said, someone would approach the man beside her and assume she was his guest, even when she was a speaker. She wanted women introduced with their own interests and ambitions. The frustration echoed her work: someone could be standing right there and still go unseen.
Leila Janah died on January 24, 2020, aged 37. The work continued through the organizations and people around her. The Give Work Challenge, which she launched with her husband, Tassilo Festetics, in 2018, became a program of the Leila Janah Foundation supporting entrepreneurs in Kenya and Uganda. In 2024, Sama introduced employee awards bearing her name. Its June 2025 impact announcement also described continued grants through the foundation.
Her career began with the willingness to revise an assumption about a student. It developed into a series of practical experiments involving customers, contracts, classrooms and ingredients. Across them, she kept asking what a person might accomplish if the next opportunity included a paycheck. The answer belonged, ultimately, to the person earning it.