Making A Real Difference

We meet the revolutionary woman behind a not-for-profit company and a fair-trade luxury skincare brand providing jobs to empower underprivileged people.

- Emma Wheaton

The top 2,000 companies in the world spend US$12 trillion annually on goods and services. “Imagine what a difference we could make in the world if we could convince the people who make those decisions to spend even a small fraction of that on hiring social enterprises that give work to low-income people,” says Leila Janah, founder and CEO of social enterprise Samasource and fair-trade luxury skincare company LXMI.

The 35-year-old founded Samasource 10 years ago. “It’s a social business that reverses poverty by connecting very low-income people to work, via the internet,” says Leila. What was initially a small start-up has now grown into a movement around ‘impact sourcing’, the notion that you, as an individual or as a company, can contribute to alleviating global poverty by changing your sourcing strategy. It’s about providing jobs, rather than charity.

Samasource, named after the Sanskrit word for equal – sama – is a not-for-profit business that trains people in underprivileged parts of the world, such as Kenya, Uganda and India with digital skills, and outsources tech jobs to them. It counts the likes of Getty Images and eBay among its clients.

Samasource became profitable in 2016 and is the largest data services firm in East Africa, employing more than 1,200 people from low-income backgrounds. Via Samasource, Leila has shown how the model for giving work, works. “We’ve created a model in the digital world that shows this pretty clearly and has really good data behind it. We’re able to move people from a US$2-a-day household income to an over-US$8-a-day household income.”