Leila Janah (1982–2020), Samasource CEO who employed the poor

Leila Janah was an entrepreneur who founded Samasource with the goal of raising up deeply impoverished people in Africa and India by giving them jobs. Janah had been working as a consultant for an outsourcing firm, which employed middle-class Indian workers to do digital jobs like tagging and annotating images. She wondered why those jobs couldn’t be done by the poor, who desperately needed the employment — so she founded Samasource, providing training and living wages to thousands of women and others in poverty. The work they do generates data used for video game technology, self-driving car research, and more. Janah later founded the luxury cosmetics line LXMI, which also employs the poor to harvest and process ingredients.