Sama Group Is Redefining What It Means To Be A Not-For-Profit Business

- Sarah Kessler

“I am so sick of fundraising.” Leila Janah, the founder and CEO of Sama Group, has just left an hour-long staff meeting about grant proposals, and she is venting as we dig into an artisanal brick-oven pizza at Farina, a restaurant in San Francisco.

Janah, 33, founded Sama in 2008 with the belief that creating work opportunities is the most effective tool for fighting poverty Sama goes into communities tha lack living-wage jobs—from the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to rural Arkansas—and trains people to do digital work, such as verifying data that makes Google’s search algorithms smarter and flagging inappropriate content posted to TripAdvisor. So far, Sama reports that it has helped approximately 51,000 people, almost 22,000 direct beneficiaries and another 29,000-plus of their income dependents. In 2015, Sama aided twice as many people as it did in 2014.

Janah, as usual, is feeling bullish about her mission, but she’s chafing at the strictures of the traditional not-for-profit model. Janah may run an antipoverty organization, but she is also a Harvard-educated former management consultant who believes in the startup ethos of experimentation, iteration, and the occasional pivot. Grant proposals, by contrast, typically compel organizations like Sama to detail programs step-by-step, in advance. “It basically requires you to predict what is going to happen in the future,” Janah says.​

Eradicating poverty, though, is by definition unpredictable labor. Janah’s team has to find and train people in Kenya who have never used a computer. It has to find dependable Internet access to teach clients in rural Arkansas, where bandwidth is as scarce as jobs. Some of the good assignments it finds require several weeks of unpaid training, and Sama’s clients can’t afford to go that long between paychecks.