Speaker: Leila Chirayath Janah, Founder, Samasource

Discussion Topic:

Samasource, a 501c3 nonprofit based in San Francisco, connects poor people who can do remote work (from simple tasks like data entry up to basic website development) to clients for their services, bridging one of the most critical gaps in the digital divide. We work directly with small businesses in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that meet high quality and social impact criteria, marketing their services to a global client base through a website and sales team.

A majority of the employees in our partner companies are women, minorities and/or from households with incomes below US$2.50 per day. With just $35K in funding from the Business in Development and Stanford Social Enterprise Challenges, we have won over $100K in contracts for the the 6 firms in our network to date and received mention in leading sustainability conferences and publications. Our plans this year include launching a women's virtual initiative for marginalized women that cannot work outside their homes and expanding our provider network to include small businesses in Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania.During this call, Leila will discuss Samasource’s approach to social development as well as outline her experiences as a social entrepreneur.

About the Speaker:

Leila Chirayath Janah is the founder of Samasource, a social business that creates jobs in low-income countries by connecting small service businesses to a global client base. Samasource won the International Business in Development Challenge in 2007 and the Stanford Social Enterprise Challenge in 2008. Through her work with Samasource, Leila has been invited to serve as a Social Enterprise Institute Fellow and speak at various conferences on technology, development, and social entrepreneurship. Prior to Samasource, Janah co-founded Incentives for Global Health with Professors Thomas Pogge and Aidan Hollis to develop new financing mechanisms for pharmaceutical R&D on diseases of the poor. She has served as a Visiting Scholar with the Stanford Program on Global Justice and a Visiting Researcher at Australian National University’s Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Earlier in her career, Janah worked for Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm based in New York, and at the World Bank’s Development Research Group. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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