Social Entrepreneur Leila Janah Is Dead at 37
Social Entrepreneur Leila Janah Is Dead at 37
People in Africa need jobs and companies need people to input data for AI. It’s a perfect match.
Social entrepreneur Leila Janah died on Thursday from complications of Epithelioid Sarcoma, a very rare cancer with which she was diagnosed in April 2019. Janah, the child of Indian immigrants, was an Africa expert who founded two non-profits and one for-profit company, all with the aim of improving life for very poor people in Africa — by giving them reasonably well paid work. She was a young global leader of the World Economic Forum, and had appeared on the cover of Inc.’s sister publication Fast Company.
Janah’s company Samasource is changing the world because of one simple and brilliant insight: Poor people in African nations are not just in need of philanthropic help, they can also be a resource for companies needing remote work, particularly data input for training artificial intelligence, which requires massive amounts of data. Samasource hires people in areas with little opportunity, trains them in AI data input and other computer tasks, and then provides their services to a list of global companies that includes Google, Microsoft, and Walmart among many others. In November, the company announced it had raised a $14.8 million Series A round of funding for Samasource’s for-profit AI business.
Janah also founded Samaschool, which provides digital training, Samahope, a crowd-funding platform for doctors treating women and children in poor areas, and LXMI, a luxury skin care brand that employs women from poor communities in the Nile Valley to harvest its products.
From $1 a day to a U.S. community college.
Samasource says it has provided reasonably paid work to more than 50,000 people. In the introduction to her 2017 book Give Work, Janah described one of them, a Kenyan woman named Vanessa Lucky Kanyi who had previously been working for $1 a day — not enough to live on even in Nairobi.
