Fresh out of Harvard in 2005, Leila Janah landed a job as a management consultant. One of her first assignments took her to Mumbai, where she traveled by auto-rickshaw to a sleek outsourcing center staffed by well-educated Indians from middle-class families. The ride took her past one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi, where cholera outbreaks are commonplace and children die of preventable diseases. Outsourcing might have been providing millions of jobs, but it wasn’t helping the country’s poorest. She began to think, “Couldn’t the people from the slums do some of this work?”
“There aren’t any unions for online workers. They haven’t had time to organize. But that could happen.”
Janah, 32, turned that idea into a nonprofit that connects poor people to low-level tech work. She started Samasource—Sama is Sanskrit for “equal”—as an outsourcing company that hires people in Africa and Asia to perform digital tasks for companies like Google and LinkedIn. Thanks to Janah, more than 30 people in northern Uganda got work from Getty Images, tagging pictures of Andy Murray and Rihanna. All told, Samasource has helped 6,527 people in nine countries find employment.
Two years ago, she launched a job-training program for low-income workers in the US. It helps people plug in to on-demand services like Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. In one early class in East Palo Alto, California, a quarter of the participants had neither a smartphone nor Internet access at home. So far, grads have increased their income 27 percent on average, starting new jobs at $12.64 an hour. Dubbed Samaschool, the effort is now rolling out across the US and, thanks to an online curriculum, globally. We talked to Janah about her plans and dreams.
You have a kind of hard-headed idealism. Where did that come from?
I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream. My parents came here from India. They had no connections. My brother and I went to public schools, and both of us succeeded.
You took time off from Harvard to do stints with the social entrepreneurship program Ashoka and the World Bank. How did that shape your views?
I emerged from that time pretty disillusioned with traditional thinking about aid. Every time I’d talk to poor people, they’d tell me they wanted the same thing: a job.
So naturally after graduation you become a management consultant.
I wanted to pay off my college loans and understand how to start a business. I was sent to go work for a big outsourcing company in India. The industry was creating millions of jobs in places that the West thought of as backwaters. But if you wanted to get a job at a call center, you had to come from a middle-class family. Very low-income people were not walking into Infosys and handing out their CVs!
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.
How did you get from there to Samasource?
I wrote a business plan for a data entry startup in Nairobi, hiring people from the slums. A lot of businesses say they’re advancing social justice because they hire people from a poor country. But it was important to me to start this business in a way that would track people’s income, find people below the poverty line, and move them above it.
I moved to Silicon Valley and pitched a bunch of VC firms. It became a nonprofit after I realized I could never raise money from investors for this idea. That was in 2008. We launched with one contract from a local nonprofit.
What kind of work has Samasource helped people get overseas?
Getty was looking for vendors to tag photos they’d acquired when they bought iStockphoto. Machine learning can handle a lot of the image recognition, but images of celebrities from different angles or with shadows needed to be processed by a human.
We set up the project in northern Uganda, which is mostly known for child soldiers and extreme rural poverty. We hired local workers. An example of success is Juliet Ayot, who was an AIDS orphan. She took money she got from tagging pictures and bought two piglets. She was able to hire someone locally to tend her pigs. Now she has a piggery.
What inspired you to start Samaschool?
We noticed our Samasource workers continued to make good incomes when they left. The earnings of the average worker in East Africa and Asia rose from $800 a year before Sama to $3,300 a year after, and stayed there. We realized that if we trained our workers how to find work for the Internet economy, we could boost our impact dramatically.
In 2013 you launched in the US. How did that come about?
I said, “Let’s start, as an experiment, a lean startup within Sama.” I hired a director from an organization that teaches job skills to foster-care youth. I said, “If you can train people and have them earn more money than it costs to train them over a period of three months, then we’ll invest in it.” That threshold was $1,200 in extra income. After three months, people were making, on average, $2,000 more.
You started in partnership with the YMCA in San Francisco’s impoverished Bayview neighborhood. How did it expand from there?
We were approached by a community college in Northern California, which has a lot of rural poverty. They approved our online curriculum so people could sign up and take Samaschool as a class. Since then we’ve expanded to several cities in California and one site in Arkansas. We’ve just started conversations with the Robin Hood Foundation to do the training in New York.
What kinds of jobs are you preparing people for?
When we started, there were two tracks—jobs you could do in person via TaskRabbit and Internet jobs that required generally higher skills, like being a virtual assistant or doing data entry. Now we realize there are a lot more local service-type jobs, like Instacart, Uber, Lyft, and Care.com.
Some people view those startups as exploiting people for jobs that offer few benefits and no way to advance.
The benefit to this model is that it’s much cheaper to train people to be successful, because a lot of them have traditional skills that can be repurposed really quickly for moneymaking. For example, we had a kid who’d had no formal job but liked to work on cars. His brothers had been involved in the drug trade in the Bayview, which is the only economic opportunity there for a lot of young men of color. He got his first job on TaskRabbit installing car stereos. The first month he made several hundred dollars doing something he loved.
Yes, the downside is these are not 9-to-5 jobs that have a pension at the end, but those jobs are disappearing.
Where do you start with the training?
At the very beginning. We help people set up their profiles, use the right keywords, identify where they might have skills that would be a good fit for these jobs, and we teach them how to apply. In some areas where there is very low technology literacy, like Arkansas, even just navigating a user interface is very foreign to people.
By the time they finish, they have already applied for several jobs. They have profiles on several online worksites. In some cases we will have them apply for a job and do the job, assisted through the class. A challenge is free Wi-Fi. We create a coworking space where people can come back every week and review their job applications with one of our instructors, and then, importantly, we teach them the finance side of things. For example, how to deal with self-employment tax.
Are you bothered by the fact that these jobs don’t come with traditional benefits?
Yes! There aren’t any unions for online workers. That’s because this industry hasn’t been around long enough for people to really get organized. But that could happen. It’s much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn’t usually published or available.
What needs to happen for the workforce to evolve?
Government could set up better systems for independent contractors to receive health care, benefits, even child care, in a very different way from how it used to be done. So maybe, instead of having low corporate tax rates where companies are expected to pay for all those things, we shift the burden to public funding and have higher capital gains taxes for investors and the companies that are designing these systems.
That perspective must make you popular in the Valley.
Many tech entrepreneurs are not opposed, in principle, to giving away some of their wealth to benefit the most vulnerable people in society. They don’t want to live in a place where nobody can afford their products. They want to live in a country with a strong middle class.
A lot of people are happy to give money to charities but are wary of giving through taxes because they feel it doesn’t produce any value. The challenge is that we haven’t seen political leadership inspired enough to develop solutions. I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.
