OCTOBER 25, 2011 – HUFFINGTON POST. BY Leila Janah
It’s true: women and girls are hot. Double-Xers are finally making it to the top of the development agenda following the publication of Sheryl WuDunn and Nick Kristof’s book Half the Sky (now a global movement), Sheryl Sandberg’s iconic TED talk on women at work, and the genius of The Girl Effect animated PSAs.
But most of the focus is on education for the “girl-child” (can’t we just call them girls?) and not on the underlying problem: women have little perceived economic value in most parts of the world.
That’s why they are selectively aborted — so much so that 120 men are born for every 100 women in China — and denied proper nutrition and health care in poor families across South Asia. Women in India are fifty percent more likely than boys to perish before they reach the age of five. Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, summed up these combined horrors in a famous piece in 1990 titled simply “More than 100 Million Women are Missing.”
This summer, you heard their speeches in our Big Omaha Video Series. Now, in partnership with our photography and moving images partner Malone & Company, we’re giving you exclusive access to backstage interviews with the entrepreneurs and innovators who presented at our Big Omaha event in May.
For one week only, the Big Omaha Backstage Pass will feature 10 of our Big Omaha speakers in 15 previously unreleased video interviews. We hope these interviews, with topics ranging from the importance of mentoring to the quest to change the world, will engage, encourage, enlighten and excite you to follow your passion, a message at the core of Big Omaha.
At Samasource we celebrate paying workers, so we popped open the (inexpensive) champagne when we sent our one-millionth dollar in worker payments to the field this summer.
We’ve now impacted over 6,000 people in 9 countries with income from the world’s leading tech companies through a model that’s sustainable and efficient — all our worker payments come directly from our client contracts. Instead of sending donations to the field, fundraising dollars go to start-up expenses, like scaling our technology infrastructure. Since January, monthly client revenues have doubled with long-term contracts with Fortune 100 clients.
In a few years, through scaling our business model, Samasource will operate entirely on earned income. In the meantime, hitting the “Million Dollar Milestone” was a great acknowledgement of the hard work of SamaTeams around the world. The team shared mimosas with jugaad prosecco and took turns pressing “send” on the worker payment interface. As the monthly payments went out, Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” played in the background.
It’s my last day in Kenya. I am outside the squat Nairobi airport terminal with my luggage, soaking up the last few rays of the sub-saharan sun. A young student in uniform approaches me – unguarded friendliness I have grown accustomed to in these two weeks ago.
Extending his hand, he introduces himself as Kennedy. Seventeen and in high school, he wants to be a computer engineer. Undaunted by the obstacles of living in the third world, Kennedy routinely goes to his local cyber – or internet café – to download and tinker with software from Softpedia.
While certainly impressed, I had become accustomed to individuals defying expectations during my two weeks in Kenya. I met Jacqueline, who is helping to send her sister to nursing school with her Samasource salary; and Samuel, who had been hauling stones for construction, and now has university plans. Rural Masai tribesmen from the Serengeti are on Facebook, and getting college degrees.
Top to bottom, there is a sense that Kenya is changing, and fast. With new fiber optics cables and a resourceful populace, Kenya is pioneering Africa’s future – and others are catching the wave. Already, Carnegie Mellon announced a satellite campus in Rwanda, and large technology companies like IBM and HP are aggressively expanding their presence in the continent.
Is it all good news? Of course not. Poverty is very pervasive, corruption is rampant, and infrastructural challenges remain: just hop in a cab during Nairobi rush-hour. But the potential is likewise undeniable – despite the many obstacles, there seem to be Kennedys everywhere, walking to their nearest cyber to exert their minds, to reach out, and touch the world with their capability.
Zack Russell joined Samasource as a Sales and Marketing Intern and joined the team full time in Sept. 2011
You may have noticed Samasource.org has a new look! The new site is the result of many months of team effort to overhaul our market positioning, messaging, and graphics, as well as the whole site architecture. Everything about samasource.org is new and reflects a more unified statement of Samasource as a brand, company and team.
Often, it is difficult for people outside the company to get their heads around “What is Samasource?” The old dual-site .org/.com structure never felt right: our mission and our business are not separate but accelerate each other. We are both a non-profit and very operationally-focused business, a tech startup and an entirely mission-driven organization. As a team, we are both intensely driven on eradicating poverty and fun-loving and collaborative around headquarters. It was a huge challenge to bring everything that makes Samasource special into one holistic presence, without summoning a visual and textual cacophony.
Throughout the process, we had fantastic guidance from Ron Goldin and his team at Akko Design, who both helped us cultivate and refine our messaging and also put together the fantastic site design and original graphics. This was the first serious investment Samasource had made in our brand and online partner. Ron was a great partner throughout, listening very carefully to everyone on the team, clients and board and bringing forth a lot of nuance to our messaging.
Ultimately, we have strong shared vision of what sets Samasource apart, and the only conflicts came down to minor details about color scheme and the location of the “We’re hiring” button. We hope you get a strong sense of what makes Samasource different. Over the next few months, you will see a series of upgrades, and we welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts to info@samasource.org.
The Trailblazers for Good Q&A Series sits down with the most world shaking individuals leading the movement to align impact, profit and purpose. Here we pick the brains of top social entrepreneurs to learn first hand from their stunning accomplishments, utter failures, and stiff challenges in leading the revolution of doing well by doing good. Join us as we explore the collective consciousness that drives and inspires these individuals.
Leila Chirayath Janah is the founder of Samasource, an award-winning social business that connects people living in poverty to microwork — small, computer-based tasks that build skills and generate life-changing income.
This video features Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource, a nonprofit connecting people living in poverty to work via the internet.
In her talk, Leila shared her vision and inspiration for starting Samasource and told stories from the field about the impact of her amazing work. One of my favorite lines from her talk reminds us of the power of the age we’re living in to not only affect change in our own backyard, but around the world:
“The internet reduces the friction of collaboration across all of these centers and time zones, and with a highly distributed workforce.”
