and life you love. An idea that I hold close to my heart is the fact that talent is universal,

but opportunity is not. And we’ve recently begun working with Sama Group, an organization

whose mission is to fight global poverty through technology. If you’ve ever wondered what

part you might play in helping make the world a more equitable place, my guest today will

show you how.

Leila Janah is the founder and CEO of Sama Group, and an award winning social entrepreneur.

Prior to founding the Sama Group, Leila was a visiting scholar with the Stanford program

on global justice and Australian University National Center for Applied Philosophy and

Public Ethics. The concept of Sama, the root word for equality or fairness in many languages,

is the guiding principle behind the family of impact enterprises Janah founded and runs.

The first of these is SamaSource, an award winning nonprofit business that connects women

and youth living in poverty to microwork: computer based tasks that build skills and

generate life changing income, now part of the broader field of impact sourcing. SamaSource

has moved 20 thousand people over the poverty line and spun out a domestic program: SamaUSA.

In 2011 Leila cofounded SamaHope, a crowdfunding site for medical treatments in developing

countries. Janah’s work with Sama Group Enterprises has been featured widely in the

press, with features in publications including The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and Fast

Company. She received a BA from Harvard and lives in San Francisco.

Leila, thank you so much for coming out to MarieTV. I really appreciate it.

It’s my great pleasure. I’m so happy to be here.

So we love you guys, we love working with the Sama Group, and I was wondering if you

can take us back to when you started or back to when you were in Mumbai and you started

to recognize that outsourcing was providing millions of jobs, yet it wasn’t reaching

the poorest populations. How did that experience inspire you and did that lead to the creation

of the Sama Group?

Sure. Well, at the time I was living in New York, actually, in the financial district.

I had just finished college and I had my first corporate job and I was working 24/7 and pulling

all nighters. And my manager, knowing that I had some foreign experience, said, “Why

don't we send you on this project to India?” So I was… I was basically thrown in head

first into a project working directly with the CEO of a big outsourcing company. And

this was the year that Thomas Friedman had written The World is Flat and the national

discourse on outsourcing was very negative and coming from a place of concern that Americans

were losing jobs overseas, that we were becoming less competitive. And so I, you know, being

someone interested in social justice was very reluctant to take on this project and even

though I’m of Indian origin I didn't really think it was a good thing that we were, you

know, partnering with these companies to lower our costs and shift jobs. So I came in with

that mindset. And one day in the call center that I was working in I met a young man who

came from Dharavi, which is south Asia’s largest slum where Slumdog Millionaire was

filmed and the kind of place where there are cholera outbreaks and children playing in

open sewers and just really horrible living conditions. They look almost post-apocalyptic.

It doesn't seem like anyone in twenty… 2005 or now 2015 could be living that way. And

so when it dawned on me that someone from that environment was capable of picking up

a phone and answering customer service questions for a woman in the UK, you know, about her

plane ticket, I realized that our understanding of poverty is very shallow, that there’s

a very large number of people around the world, people who we would consider to be living

in extreme poverty, making less than 2 dollars a day, unable to meet their basic human needs

for food, water, shelter, and education, who are capable of working in the new economy,

working in the digital economy. And that lightbulb is what inspired Sama, the idea that this

business model of outsourcing, which has created now billions of dollars and several billionaires,

that we could take some of those billions of dollars and… and shift the model so that

they went directly into the pockets of people we would otherwise consider charity cases,

like this young man. And that was the origin of the idea.

And so when you had that idea, take me from idea to then the first whether it was project

or you actually leaving your job and then making Sama real.

It took about 2 years. I mentioned the idea to my boss and as a tribute to that firm,

you know, he really believed in personal development and he knew that this was my passion. So he

said, “I think we should fund you to do more research on this idea and maybe it’ll

benefit the firm in some way.” So our company actually gave me, like, a thousand dollar

travel stipend to go and do some more research on this in Africa. And my idea was to take

the outsourcing model and figure out how we could turn it into a social enterprise, much

like if people are familiar with microfinance, much like Muhammad Yunus did with the banking

industry. He thought, “Here’s this great industry that’s provided access to capital

for billions of people globally but has left out the poor,” and he adapted the model

to fit the needs of the poor. So I thought maybe we could do something similar with outsourcing.

And from that moment in… in late 2005, I started working on a business plan on my nights

and weekends to start a company that would only hire people like that young man I met

at the call center. So the threshold for new workers would be, of course, you have to want

to work hard and be capable and have basic skills like reading and writing English. So

high school graduates. But you also have to come from a very poor background, and we would

actually screen out people who came from wealthier backgrounds who might otherwise get a job.

So I worked on the business plan for about a year and a half and I submitted it to a

competition online in the Netherlands for this new category of social venture. And lo

and behold they sent me an email several months later saying, “Congratulations. You’ve

made it to the semifinals. Come to Amsterdam.” And I had kind of forgotten at that point

that I’d even sent this out. It was really a pipedream. And… and I went to Amsterdam

and they gave me I think it was the first runner up prize, so I had, like, 25 thousand

dollars that they gave me. And that was enough to convince me that I could quit my job and

survive for long enough to do this. And it wasn’t easy. My parents don't make much

money, I’ve loaned money to my parents in the past, I don't come from a wealthy family,

I still am paying off my undergraduate student loans at the age of 32. So it was a pretty

big decision for me to do that, but it just gave me that… that push. And I had a lot

of friends who were willing to, you know, let me sleep on their couches and such for

a while.

And what did you do with that first 25 thousand? Like, how did you figure out what you wanted

to spend that on? I know you had your business plan, but it was like do I need to hire someone

first? How did you… what did you do with that money?

So I realized that it wasn’t going to be very much money to hire anyone, even back

in 2008, the year that I ended up launching the business. So my first step was to go to

Kenya where I knew I wanted to launch based on demographics. Kenya is a former British

colony, much like India, that has a large youth population that is both somewhat educated

and dramatically unemployed. So you will find young people living in the slums who can read

and write English, who’ve gone to a rural school, and, you know, paid their school fees

their whole life and really wanna work hard but are… just happen to have drawn the…

the wrong ticket in life’s birth lottery and happened to be living in a slum. So looking

at the demographic trends across sub-saharan Africa, the world’s poorest continent where

we thought we could make the biggest difference, I identified Kenya and I used part of the

money to go there initially, stay in the cheapest hotel I could find, and interview local entrepreneurs

who could partner with me. And my idea was I saw all of these internet cafes around the

world in low income areas and I thought, “What if I could convince the internet cafe owners

to make part of their business an outsourcing business? What if I could convince them to

hire local youth, use their computers, and complete small projects?” And initially

my first instinct was data entry. Something very simple. I had a lot of friends who were

entrepreneurs or involved in startups in Silicon Valley that needed basic data processing like,

you know, we’ve collected all these receipts and we need them scanned and entered into

a spreadsheet, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And so it’s straightforward enough that I could actually be the person to secure the

work and do the quality assurance. So the first money I spent going to Kenya, identifying

that partner. I came back to the US, I rented a tiny office space, I paid myself 400 dollars

a month for the first 9 months or so of the operation until I literally could not do that

anymore and… and then I got to work. So I spent the money also on software. I found

a software platform that would let me load these projects and manage them myself, and

then I went around to every entrepreneur I knew who might need these types of services,

I made a brochure on my Mac, printed it out at Kinko’s…

Yes!

...and I got our first contract in September of 2008, which is the month we started officially

the business. A friend of mine who is running a large nonprofit in the Bay Area said, “We

have this project for blind readers.” He operates the largest online library for blind

readers called BookShare.org and it’s an audio library. And so he had a need for people

to review transcripts of books to make them really perfect before he put them into his

audio software. And so we loved the idea of working with a social venture and having our

first project be, you know, be beneficial for… for disabled people around the world.

And… and he was willing to give us a… a 30 thousand dollar contract to start. And…

and so I personally guaranteed him in the meeting that I would… I would take personal

responsibility for the quality of the work, which meant many, many late nights, you know,

poring through transcripts of audio books for middle school aged kids. And… and that’s

kind of what got us on our way. And the next year we ended up doing about 200 thousand

dollars in sales revenue from those types of projects all initially secured by me and

then I found someone on Craigslist to help me with sales who remains a friend.

How incredible is that? You’re just such an inspiration. I love this story and I haven’t…

I’ve done so much research and I love what you do and I haven’t heard that, so genius.

Talk to us about impact sourcing. What it means and why it’s important.

I’m so glad that you brought that up, Marie. Impact sourcing is a new term that refers

to making sourcing decisions in your business, or at least part of them, based around social

impact in addition to quality. So the idea is, you know, we have all of these problems

around the world, global poverty and domestic poverty being one of them. One way to solve

those problems is to deliberately work with enterprises that have a social or environmental

mission. And thus you can use the… the budget that you have allocated in your business to

address these social problems rather than trying to maximize your profit and then donating

it at the end to a charity. And this is a way of thinking that actually has a long history

here in the United States. One of my favorite examples is Goodwill Industries. Most people

think of Goodwill as a nice charity and they donate their clothes. Goodwill actually earns

3 billion dollars globally in store revenue from all of their stores globally. And all

of that store revenue comes from employing marginalized people in the store in addition

to recycling donated clothing. And Goodwill also offers services for offices that want

to… that want to move and have a large number of items they need picked up and recycled,

or I think they also offer setup services for corporate events. So if you are the procurement

manager in a company or you’re running an event, you have a choice as to what vendors

you choose. And the idea of impact sourcing is that you… you deliberately choose vendors,

and maybe not for everything that you, you know, need to source, but maybe for some percentage

of your sourcing needs, that have an overt social mission. And the other idea of impact

sourcing is that you needn’t compromise on quality to have that social impact. So

I was just on a panel yesterday with the CEO of Glass Door, which is a technology company

that lets employees rate their employers and provide more transparency in the workplace.

They now have about 600 employees. And I met him just before the panel, 30 minutes before,

and he said, “I had no idea that SamaSource was a nonprofit.” I was telling him about

some of the fundraising challenges I had. And he was kind of blown away and he said,

“We’ve been working with you…” they now have about 85 workers who are SamaSource

workers globally. He said, “We’ve been working with you for over a year and nobody

on my team ever said, ‘These guys are a nonprofit.’ I just thought you were the

best quality service we could find.” And so… so that’s a wonderful story and I

do wanna tell people we’re a nonprofit because I think it helps them understand that if we

do ever make a profit on this kind of work it will all be reinvested in our work and

none of us are doing this for personal gain. We can’t, by law. And I think the model

of impact sourcing that’s so interesting is that by hiring SamaSource, Glass Door is

directly contributing to the same kind of poverty alleviation that we would normally

be paying for with aid or charitable dollars. So, you know, in the prior model, Americans

work hard, we get taxed, some percentage of our income through that tax goes to USAID,

our agency for international development, and then that organization hires people to

administer programs overseas that theoretically help the people that we’re helping on this