As a high-school student in Los Angeles, Leila Janah won a grant to spend six months in Ghana teaching English to blind children. She was shaken by the discovery that some people there died because they lacked a few dollars for medicine. Others, however bright, were cut off from job opportunities.
After earning a degree in economic development at Harvard University and working as a consultant, she became a social entrepreneur, seeking to provide jobs for the world’s poorest people. Samasource Impact Sourcing Inc., one of the companies she founded, employs people in Kenya, Uganda and India to work on tasks essential to developing artificial-intelligence applications. Those tasks include tagging objects in photos of roads for use in self-driving systems and marking points on faces for facial-recognition software.
Ms. Janah, the daughter of Indian immigrants, also founded LXMI Beauty Inc., a maker of skin lotions that provides work for women in Uganda, and Samaschool, a nonprofit that trains people to work in the gig economy.
Ms. Janah died Jan. 24. She was 37 and had a rare form of cancer, epithelioid sarcoma.
“Many well-meaning people will insist that eradicating poverty is impossible,” she wrote in “Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time,” her 2017 book. “Perhaps that was once true, but thanks to technology, it’s not anymore.”
Samasource, formerly a nonprofit, raised $14.8 million of venture capital in 2019. Though it has become a for-profit company, Samasource is majority-owned by a nonprofit whose purpose is to preserve the social mission.
Leila Chirayath was born Oct. 9, 1982, in Lewiston, N.Y. (She later changed her last name to Janah, her mother’s maiden name.) Her parents had immigrated to the U.S. in 1978. Her father was a structural engineer. Her mother, who had a degree in English literature from an Indian university, initially found work chopping onions at a Wendy’s restaurant and later retrained herself in computer science. The family moved to Arizona and then Los Angeles while Leila was a child.
She recalled moving 12 times in childhood and wearing thrift-shop clothing. “If you’re the only brown kid, you’re wearing weird clothes, you don’t have TV at home and your parents have funny accents, then you’re always an outcast,” she told the New York Times in 2017. Her parents’ marriage broke down.
She found refuge in humanitarian causes. As a teenager, she joined a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and started a branch of Amnesty International in her high school.
Her time in Ghana was life-changing. “I had subconsciously bought into the myth that poor people are poor because they didn’t want to better themselves, because they squandered opportunities and wasted their talents,” she wrote in her book. “It had never occurred to me before that there were places where there simply were no opportunities.”
While at Harvard, she worked as a barmaid and cleaned dormitory toilets for spending money. “I began to calculate purchases by the number of toilets it took to afford them,” she wrote.
After graduating, she joined Katzenbach Partners, a consulting firm, and was based in New York. One assignment took her to a call center in Mumbai. She noticed that the outsourcing business typically hired middle-class Indians. “That got me thinking: Maybe there’s a way to use this model to help people in the slums, especially for some of the easier tasks like data entry,” she told Wired in 2015.
In her mid-20s, she quit her job and moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to work on what became Samasource, a name derived from sama, a Sanskrit word meaning “equal.” She raised money, including a grant from the Dutch Postcode Lottery. To hold down expenses, she bunked for a while on a former boyfriend’s futon.
There were moments of doubt. “What the hell was I thinking?” she wrote later. “Did I have some kind of messiah complex? Who was I to think I could actually make any kind of a dent in poverty?”
She learned to manage people by trial and error. “I was a brutal manager—slaving away at all hours and expecting the same of my team, and getting angry when things didn’t work out,” she wrote. She could be impulsive in hiring. That led to high attrition in the early days. “My advice to all founders,” she wrote, “is to hire slowly.”
But Samasource began finding contracts, including one to proofread digital book transcripts, providing work for Kenyans. In recent years, the company has focused on work related to artificial intelligence. Since 2008, Samasource says, it has provided jobs to more than 11,480 people.
Jetting around the world left her skin parched. She noticed women in Uganda had smooth skin and found they used shea butter, made from the nuts of an indigenous tree. That discovery spawned her beauty-products company, LXMI.
Her Samaschool nonprofit was created partly as a way of helping poor Americans caught on the wrong side of the digital divide, giving them a better chance to find work. Among the skills taught are setting up internet profiles, matching skills to job opportunities, and applying for those jobs.
Colleagues and friends said her companies will carry on. Samasource has named Wendy Gonzalez as interim CEO.
Through mutual friends, Ms. Janah met Tassilo Festetics, vice president for global solutions at Anheuser-Busch InBev SA . They married last March. Her cancer diagnosis came as she was preparing for the wedding.
Her favorite pastimes included kitesurfing and paragliding. During her cancer treatment, she took up painting and learned to play the ukulele.
She is survived by her husband, a stepdaughter, her parents and a brother.
In the 2017 interview, she spoke about her experiences of starting up companies. “The biggest reason for success in entrepreneurship is not brilliance,” she said. “It’s not creative genius. It’s the simple ability to not quit when things are really bad.”
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
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