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LEILA JANAH, 1983-2020 |
Samasource, the company she founded, announced late last month that their 37-year-old CEO Leila Janah has died of epithelioid sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer, reports CNN.
“Her commitment to creating a better world was unparalleled and the ripple effects of her work will be felt for generations. We will miss her every day,” said the statement.
The company she founded, Samasource, announced her death late last month. In 2008 she founded her artificial intelligence company in Kenya with the mission of improving the lives of the poor.
“Her commitment to creating a better world was unparalleled,” said a statement issued by Samasource. “The ripple effects of her work will be felt for generations. We are all committed to continuing Leila’s work, and to ensuring her legacy and vision is carried out for years to come.”
“I strongly believe you can combine the highest quality of service with the core mission of altruism,” she said in a recent interview with Tech Crunch.
“A big part of our values is offering living wages and creating dignified technology work for people. We hire people from low-income backgrounds and offer them training in AI and machine learning. And our teams achieve above the industry standard.”
Janah, a child of Indian immigrants, was born in upstate New York, and raised in a suburb of Los Angeles. She attended the California Academy of Mathematics and Science where, during her senior year, she was awarded a six month scholarship to teach English in Ghana. There she witnessed what would become the singular motivation of her life’s work: the tragedy of talented and hard-working people struggling in poverty solely due to geographical isolation from well-paying jobs.
This experience inspired Janah to create her own degree in African Development Studies at Harvard University. Upon graduating, she joined Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.) as a management consultant. While on one of her first professional assignments, working as a manager for a call center in Mumbai, she learned that one of her employees commuted to work from his home in the slums every day by rickshaw. “I thought, ‘What if we could locate the call center in the slums?’” she told The Christian Science Monitor in 2014, crediting this moment with sparking the idea for Samasource.
“I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation,” she wrote in 2012. “Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.”
Samasource, which in 2019 raised a $14.8 million in funding, now hires people from East Africa and India, trains them in data skills for AI and broader digital work, then offers solutions that combine human judgment with technology to a host of global companies including Microsoft, Walmart, and others encompassing 25% of the Fortune 100. In a piece on Janah’s passing, TechCrunch noted that “Janah and her company were well ahead of their time, as issues related to bias in [Machine Learning] models have become top-of-mind for many product leaders in Silicon Valley today.”
Since its founding, Samasource has impacted the lives of over 50,000 people in developing countries around the world by providing them the tools to become competitive laborers in the digital age. Leila’s book, "Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time," was released in 2017.
Janah’s efforts were motivated by the same guiding principle - that in providing dignity through work, we can eliminate world poverty - and over the years she found new ways to fulfill that mandate.
“Her commitment to creating a better world was unparalleled,” said a statement issued by Samasource. “The ripple effects of her work will be felt for generations. We are all committed to continuing Leila’s work, and to ensuring her legacy and vision is carried out for years to come.”
“I strongly believe you can combine the highest quality of service with the core mission of altruism,” she said in a recent interview with Tech Crunch.
“A big part of our values is offering living wages and creating dignified technology work for people. We hire people from low-income backgrounds and offer them training in AI and machine learning. And our teams achieve above the industry standard.”
Janah, a child of Indian immigrants, was born in upstate New York, and raised in a suburb of Los Angeles. She attended the California Academy of Mathematics and Science where, during her senior year, she was awarded a six month scholarship to teach English in Ghana. There she witnessed what would become the singular motivation of her life’s work: the tragedy of talented and hard-working people struggling in poverty solely due to geographical isolation from well-paying jobs.
This experience inspired Janah to create her own degree in African Development Studies at Harvard University. Upon graduating, she joined Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.) as a management consultant. While on one of her first professional assignments, working as a manager for a call center in Mumbai, she learned that one of her employees commuted to work from his home in the slums every day by rickshaw. “I thought, ‘What if we could locate the call center in the slums?’” she told The Christian Science Monitor in 2014, crediting this moment with sparking the idea for Samasource.
“I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation,” she wrote in 2012. “Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.”
Samasource, which in 2019 raised a $14.8 million in funding, now hires people from East Africa and India, trains them in data skills for AI and broader digital work, then offers solutions that combine human judgment with technology to a host of global companies including Microsoft, Walmart, and others encompassing 25% of the Fortune 100. In a piece on Janah’s passing, TechCrunch noted that “Janah and her company were well ahead of their time, as issues related to bias in [Machine Learning] models have become top-of-mind for many product leaders in Silicon Valley today.”
Since its founding, Samasource has impacted the lives of over 50,000 people in developing countries around the world by providing them the tools to become competitive laborers in the digital age. Leila’s book, "Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time," was released in 2017.
Janah’s efforts were motivated by the same guiding principle - that in providing dignity through work, we can eliminate world poverty - and over the years she found new ways to fulfill that mandate.
In 2013, Jamah launched Samaschool, a nonprofit focused on reskilling for the new economy. The aim was to bridge the digital divide in the United States by raising the level of technological know-how in underserved local communities. “She flipped the equation,” Maria Konnikova wrote in Pacific Standard. “Rather than teach specific skills geared at concrete jobs, she would train potential workers in basic computer and digital literacy skills that could then be translated into any number of jobs online.”
In 2019, Janah turned Samasource ainto a for-profit tech company, with Sama, the original nonprofit, as the company’s largest shareholder. The shift provides Samasource with access to the external capital required for scale while ensuring that social impact remains embedded in the core DNA of the business. Samasource COO Wendy Gonzalez, who has spent five years working closely alongside Jamah to build the firm’s vision and strategy, is now at the helm as the company’s interim CEO. Janah leaves behind her family — her husband Tassilo Festetic, her stepdaughter Mia, her godchildren.
If you would like to make a donation to honor Janah's legacy and support her mission to Give Work, visit givework.org.
ASAM NEWS contributed to this report.
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