Social entrepreneur Leila Janah brought a “start-up mentality” to charity work when she established Samasource, a business that connects the poorest of the poor to digital work. Her employees – who hail from disadvantaged communities, worldwide – tag and digitize records for over a hundred companies, including eBay and Walmart. They have, thus, lifted themselves from poverty. People often assume charitable and for-profit work are mutually exclusive; but Janah explains how companies can integrate social good and “giving work” into a company’s DNA, while still turning a profit.
Samasource founder Leila Janah’s immigrant background laid the foundation for her appreciation of the power of work to transform lives.
Janah felt passionately about addressing world hunger and poverty from a young age. She went to rural Ghana through an American Field Service program to teach blind children English.
The World Bank defines extreme poverty as income of $1.90 per day. That figure reflects purchasing power: how much roughly $2 buys in an average city in the United States. Many Ghanaians live on this subsistence wage.
Janah once believed in “meritocracy”: the notion that all people need in order to succeed is to work hard. Her experience in Ghana dispelled this belief. Her blind students were smart, ambitious kids. In a place where poverty caused death because people couldn’t afford a $4 dose of medicine, Janah saw that only an accident of birth – and not talent or brains – separated her fate from that of her students.
Janah wanted to help the children she was teaching succeed; this desire planted the seed for her social entrepreneurship. People living in constant scarcity think only in terms of short-term survival...
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