Leila Jana is a famous American businesswoman. She founded the non-profit organization Samasource and has launched a number of other initiatives under the Sama Group brand. She is a member of the TechSoup Global board and advisor to SpreeTales, and co-founder of the non-profit organization Incentives for Global Health.
Leila is a popular media personality, whose speeches, interviews and photographs have been featured on the front pages and on leading television, radio stations and publications in the United States.
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 was spent 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 babysitting and tutoring. Leila grew up an intelligent girl, loved to study: she took courses at the California Academy of Mathematics and Sciences.
When the girl was seventeen years old, she won a scholarship from American Field Services and convinced the foundation to let her spend it on teaching in Ghana. She was in this country for six months, teaching 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 various missions.
Later, Leila still received her education: in 2005 she received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University with a specialization in African Development Research. During her studies, the student conducted fieldwork in Mozambique, Senegal and Rwanda - helping the poor and working for the World Bank's Development Research Group on Social and Economic Rights.
Career
After graduating from university, 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 run a call center in Mumbai. At the call center, Jana met a young man who rode a rickshaw every day from Dharavi, one of the largest slums in South Asia, because he managed to find a job 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, Layla resigned from 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 affairs 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 prompted Jana to create the Samasource company - this happened in 2008. Samasource is committed to promoting innovative ideas and technologies in all areas of human life. The creator calls the main mission of his company to empower people with low incomes through the digital economy. This model has already helped more than fifty thousand people to get out of poverty.
In addition, Samasource, after initial support of people, monitors their progress, career advancement and acquisition of new life skills. These programs include health and disease prevention education, skills development, a fellowship program to help defray continuing education costs, and a microcredit and mentoring program for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Samasource has been named one of the most innovative companies by the American Fast Company magazine. This is especially valuable given that the list also includes such famous businesses as Walmart, Google, General Motors and Microsoft.
Samasource today has offices in San Francisco, California, New York, The Hague, Costa Rica, Montreal, Nairobi, Kenya, Kampala, Uganda and Gulu.
Samaschool
In 2013, Jana created the Samaschool project. It is a special program that helps people get out of poverty by providing training for various activities via the Internet. This job is not very well paid, but it provides a living wage for people, and in poor countries it is highly valued. Samaschool runs personal programs in Arkansas, California, New York and Kenya, and provides online classes available internationally. That is, a person from anywhere in the world can enter this class online and receive the necessary knowledge.
In 2012, Jana launched Samahope, the first crowdfunding platform that directly funded doctors working in poor communities. This allowed anyone to directly fund these doctors. Samahope is founded on the principle of transparency, when people see that their money has gone exactly as intended. This is a significant contribution to helping the poor.
Leila has many more projects that have been implemented, all aimed at improving the lives of the poor.
For her work, Dzhana has been repeatedly awarded prizes and distinctions. And in 2016 Elle magazine included her in the list of "Five promising entrepreneurs who are changing the world." She was named a Forbes Rising Star by The New York Times. Other publications also consider Leila one of America's most promising entrepreneurs.
