Leila Jana is a famous American businesswoman. She founded the non-profit organization Samasource and created a number of other initiatives, united by a common brand Sama Group. She is a member of the TechSoup Global board and advisor to SpreeTales, as well as a co-founder of the non-profit organization Incentives for Global Health.
Leila is a popular media person whose speeches, interviews and photographs are featured on the front pages and on leading television channels, radio stations, and in US publications.
Biography
Leila Jana was born in 1982 in Luiston, near Niagara Falls. In her blood flows Indian blood from her father and Belgian from her mother. Her childhood passed in San Pedro, California.
Jana describes her childhood as difficult, mainly due to the lack of sufficient material support. As a teenager, she worked in many jobs, including childcare and tutoring. Leila grew up a smart girl, loved to study: she went to courses at the California Academy of Mathematics and Sciences.
When she was seventeen years old, she won a scholarship from American Field Services and convinced the foundation to let her spend her teaching in Ghana. She has been in this country for six months: she taught English to young students in the village of Akuapem, many of whom were blind.
Jana later recalled that this early experience gave her a great desire to help people who were in difficult life situations. Subsequently, she repeatedly visited Africa with different missions.
Later, Leila nevertheless received her education: in 2005, she received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University with a degree in Research on the Development of Africa. During her studies, the student carried out field work in Mozambique, Senegal and Rwanda - helping the poor and working for the World Bank's Development Research Group on Social and Economic Rights.
Career
Upon graduation, Jana worked as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners, specializing in healthcare, mobile and outsourcing companies. One of Jana's first appointments at Katzenbach Partners was to manage a call center in Mumbai. At the call center, Jana met a young man who drove a rickshaw from Dharavi every day, one of the largest slums in South Asia, because he managed to find work in the city center. Then Leila thought that the experience of this young man could be a source of inspiration for other people, and began to think about this topic, developing her own program to help the poor.
In 2007, Leila quit Katzenbach because she was invited to a position at Stanford University to work on the Global Justice Program, founded by law professor Joshua Cohen. In the same year, she co-founded Incentives for Global Health with Thomas Pogge, professor of philosophy and international relations at Yale University, and Aidan Hollis, professor of economics at the University of Calgary, who developed a plan for the production of new drugs for rare diseases.
Samasource
All this experience of working and interacting with people inspired Janu to create the Samasource company - this happened in 2008. Samasource promotes cutting-edge ideas and technologies in all areas of human life. The creator calls the main mission of his company the empowerment of low-income people through the digital economy. This model has now helped more than fifty thousand people get out of poverty.
In addition, Samasource, after the initial support of people, monitors their successes, career advancement and the acquisition of new life skills. These programs include health and disease prevention education, skills development, a scholarship program to help cover the costs of continuing education, and a microloan and mentoring program for start-ups.
Samasource was named one of the most innovative companies according to the American magazine Fast Company. This is especially valuable, given that the list also includes such well-known businesses in its field as Walmart, Google, General Motors and Microsoft.
Today, Samasource has offices in San Francisco, California, New York, The Hague, Costa Rica, Montreal, Nairobi, Kenya, Kampala, Uganda and Gulu.
