Leila Janah

Leila Janah was born in 1982 in Lewiston, New York, to parents who had emigrated from India with little, and grew up in California in a family that moved often and was sometimes short of money. At sixteen she won a scholarship from a tobacco company's charitable arm and, rather than use it for university fees, spent it going to Ghana to teach English to blind students. The pupils, she found, were as sharp as anyone she had known at home; the difference was the accident of where they were born.

She studied development economics at Harvard, worked at the World Bank and as a management consultant, and on a project in Mumbai visited a call centre where staff from the slums earned wages that changed their families' lives. The question that followed her home was why so little of the world's digital work reached the people who needed it most.

In 2008 she founded Samasource, a non-profit that took data tasks from technology companies, image tagging, transcription and later training data for machine learning, and had them done by workers in Kenya, Uganda and India recruited from poverty, at a fair wage, with training. Investors told her it would not scale and clients told her the quality would be poor. By 2019 it had a large client list and had moved more than 50,000 people and their dependents above the poverty line. She also founded LXMI, a skincare brand sourcing shea butter from women in Uganda, on the same principle.

In 2019 she was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma, a rare cancer, and died in January 2020, aged 37.