She is the founder of Samasource, a social business that connects over 550 women, youth, and refugees living in poverty to microwork — small, computer-based tasks that build skills and generate life-changing income. Samasource was a winner in the Stanford Social Enterprise Challenge in 2008 and is a current grantee of the Rockefeller Foundation. In recognition of her work, Leila received the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship and has been invited to serve as a TED and Social Enterprise Institute Fellow. Janah is a frequent speaker on social entrepreneurship, technology, and international development at institutions including MIT, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard. Her work has been profiled by CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The New Scientist, and GOOD, and she is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and Social Edge.

Prior to Samasource, Janah was a founding Director of Incentives for Global Health, an organization formed by Professors Thomas Pogge and Aidan Hollis and advised by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen to develop new financing mechanisms for pharmaceutical R&D on diseases of the poor. She has served as a Visiting Scholar with the Stanford Program on Global Justice and a Visiting Researcher at Australian National University’s Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.

Leila received her BA from Harvard University in 2005, where she led the Harvard International Development Group and published work on the Rwandan genocide. Earlier in her career, Janah worked for Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm based in New York, the World Bank’s Development Research Group, and as a travel writer for Let’s Go guidebooks in Mozambique, Brazil, and Borneo. She resides in San Francisco.