Name: Watch Entrepreneur Leila Janah’s Full Interview From Fortune-Time’s Global Forum
Uploaded: 2016-12-02
Duration: 14 min 17 s
Description: The co-founder & CEO of LXMI and CEO of Samasource talks about her profitable non-profit and how it’s bringing good paying work to slums worldwide.

[ MUSIC ] You are all in for quite a treat, I can't remember who it was already this morning who mentioned that we need to focus not just about talking, but about doing. Lila Jana is a doer, and I'm gonna ask her to start by telling you about what her organization does, and where we're gonna come around to our very Quick sprint of a conversation Leila is how the people who represent the businesses in the room can do similar things. Sure, so the organization I started, Samasource is a profitable non- profit. So we aer such an anomaly in Silicon Valley I can't even tell you. [ LAUGH ] We're one of the few intentional non- profits in the Bay Area. And we started eight years ago to connect low income people to work through the Internet. So I had read Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat. I had actually worked as a management consultant for the outsourcing industry in India. And I thought what if we could take this enormous industry, global outsourcing, and transform it so it could benefit people at the very bottom of the pyramid. What Muhammad Yunus did for micro finance, I thought we could do for outsourcing and create this new model of what we call micro work. So we started eight years ago breaking these big data projects down into small units of work. For example, we do image tagging for several of the biggest machine learning algorithms now in Silicon Valley. We have about 1, 100 workers working full time doing this micro work from low income regions around the world. Break that down and go into detail briefly into those if you would. Who are the clients And where are the workers and are they your employees, are they somebody else's employees? Sure, so we started off doing data entry work eight years ago back before optical character recognition could do a lot of this in an automated way. Now we do things like image tagging and content services for firms like Microsoft, Glassdoor, Trip Advisor, IBM, we're actually talking to your team right now about doing this. And so this is a really new type of work. Training the machines to do what humans used to do is an entirely new field. And as you mentioned earlier, Jenny, this idea of augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence requires a lot of human input. So we're training people who would otherwise be completely disconnected from the digital economy, people who previously made less than two dollars a day. In this new type of work and it's a model we now call impact sourcing. And so, you mentioned Microsoft, they pay Samasource? That's right, they pay Samasource and we act as an agency that hires these workers directly. Now, about 700 of the workers in our network are direct. We run a center in Kenya. That employees own directly. And we also work through partners, so other organizations who have computer centers in low income countries, typically nonprofits that train people in these digital work skills. Take everyone, if you would, on quick cook's tour of where you are because you're both in the developing world And in the developed world, correct? That's right, we started a program in the US a couple of years ago backed by the Robin Hood Foundation in New York and we had this idea of training low income Americans to do this kind of data services work but also to benefit from the gig economy. So we were the first non- profit to develop. Training tools for low income people to benefit from platforms like Uber and Lyft and Task Rabbit and Care. com. And we're actually about to announce a partnership with Care. com, something called the Care Institute we've been working on for several months to train low income people to be caregivers on this new gig economy platform. It's kind of shocking to me that there are no Federal or state funded job training programs in the United States that focus on this rapidly growing sector of the gig economy. So you're, if I understand you correctly around the United States and around the world people give care on an informal basis. They do it but they don't participate in any sort of platform and it's a reputational issue? That's right. One of the main benefits of I think of formalizing this informal work is giving people access to reputational equity. As white collar workers you get to benefit from a good job you did. You get a recommendation on LinkedIn, you get a whole employment history. If you are a day laborer, you go and you do great work for the day, the next day you're zeroed out again. You're standing on a street corner and you have no ability to actually Earn more money based on doing good work. So what we see in many of this platforms is that there is a very quick route for workers to make more money faster if they're doing good work and actually befit from the same reputation advantage that white collar workers have had foe many decades. Now Larry you have something what I think is a radical radically interesting far on this which is that You see the opportunity to replicate some of the function that labor unions have had over modern history, is that correct? Yes, so I don't want to go too far knowing who's in the audience and I don't have a lot of experience in this space, but I think at the dawn of industrialization there was a huge need for labor unions to come in and Ensure that poor people didn't get the shaft, right? That workers had some kind of bargaining power. And I think in the new world of the gig economy, we need to reinvent the labor union for this new demographic and this new type of employment. And it's starting to happen. We're in discussions The Care. com partnership I mentioned includes the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is a phenomenal organization in the U. S. It's the first to give low income, informal care givers some of the same benefits of union membership. Give a sense, if you would, of your organization's size, both in monetary figures but also in people figures. So we're so tiny. We have 1100 full- time workers now and again, these are all people who come from backgrounds making less than $ 2. 50 a day. So we deliberately only hire people from slums and rural areas who were previously Living in poverty, and they, on average, quadruple their income, working with us. In Nairobi, now, our group of about 700 workers has gone, on average, from $ 2 a day, to over $ 16 a day, and they stay at that level after they leave our facility. So, we're basically breaking them into the formal sector for the first time And our staff is pretty tiny. We have about 80 people across Nairobi. We just opened an office in The Hague in the Netherlands, where we were actually given an incentive by the government to open an office there. And then in San Francisco where we have our sales team. A sort of two- fold question, what can big businesses do to help, first of all Well, I'll give you the first part first. Go ahead. Sure, well since we started international aid, the model has been we make money through the traditional for profit, profit maximizing business sector and we donate that to charity. And we give poor people essentially free goods and services. Either by donating large sums or transferring large sums to their governments. Or by running large charitable organizations that provide those goods and services locally. And forgive me, Lila, the profit part you're talking about, are employment agency commissions? I just mean through philanthropy or taxation. And what we've seen, and what cardinal Terkson said so beautifully, is that people are really fundamentally empowered through work. Work is the most empowering. Thing for low income people. And so when we write them off by seeing them as victims and essentially giving them hand outs in some form or another, I think we're writing off their dignity. We're not really seeing them as equal participants in the economy. So I think the beautiful model behind giving work is that you're giving dignity, you're giving hope and you're giving a long terms solution to poverty and all of the downstream effects of poverty. So many of the problems that we're trying to fight here in this room Are fundamentally rooted in the fact that over a billion people are still living on less than 125 a day. Over 2 billion people are still living on less than 250 a day. The only way to tackle that problem at it's root, I think, is to give employment or in the worst case some kind of an unrestricted cash transfer, a basic income. Employment is obviously preferable because it's sustainable. So if you want to help as a business later, and again Cardinal [ UNKNOWN ] said it beautifully Start with your supply chain. How can you hire organizations like Samasource that are providing employment at the bottom of the pyramid? How can you source ethically from distributors in countries that are not just taking the margin for themselves? And there are now More and more social enterprises working at the base of a pyramid that partner with large corporation and we started a beauty business. We are the first beauty brand so that a fore in united states one of the largest beauty retailers That is sourcing directly from low income fair trade women's cooperatives in East Africa. It's a type of shea butter that we've retailed. Tell everyone the name of your business. It's called LXMI, L- X- M- I based on the Hindu goddess of beauty and prosperity. But we're showing that you can take a A raw ingredient that comes from a rural part of East Africa and market it as a luxury product to US consumers and highlight the social impact of what you're doing and consumers especially millennials care deeply about this. We've seen the phenomenon of what V parkers, the eye glasses and Tom shoes Millennials are very likely to switch brands with one associated with a good cause. So as business leaders, you have the opportunity to not just donate some percentage of your income to philanthropy, but through the course of doing business, do more good. Before we go, the point I'm curious about, the supply chain, if we could come back to that. Your core business is an employment agency, right? There's many employment agencies around the world, but I think what you're suggesting is that those employment agencies aren't quite getting the job done if you will. Isn't there, I assume what you're saying is there's an opportunity for multi national corporations in particular I mean, you made a good pitch, use us, use Samasource. But also to replicate that in their various locations, can they do that? Sure, I mean, we're a tiny organization. I think we're mainly serving as a model for this new concept of impact sourcing. And I have to credit the Rockefeller Foundation, one of our first Granters for bringing this new model to life. Rockefeller was behind the idea of impact investing and then they said well what if we took that more broadly to look at the way that companies source? What if we could achieve social and environmental Back through sourcing programs at very large corporations. And if you think about that, that's where massive, massive transfers of wealth are happening. Yes. So if you look into your supply chain and identify suppliers that have positive Social environmental impact on the ground that's probably a much more profound way to make impact than through donating some small percentage of your employee's time or resources. Quick question from Layla from the floor, anybody? If not, two quick questions that I wanna bring us back before we leave to Silicon Valley so. I wanna push you on the quality of the jobs that you're talking about, the dignity of the jobs that you're talking about. How confident are you that helping somebody drive a car into the middle of the night, you know what I'm saying, how confident are you with these Gig economy jobs are in fact good jobs? I'll give you a story about one of our workers who comes from Mathare, it's a slum in Nairobi. If any of you have been in a slum in Nairobi, basically, like a post apocalyptic looking world. It's just got awful that in 2016, there are still a billion human beings living this way, it's unacceptable. One of our workers comes from that slum and entered our training program, maybe three years ago Did really well, then started doing image tagging for one of our big clients. And what we find is that digital work is a stepping stone into new economy jobs. It's very different from say, factory work. Because for the first time, people are being exposed to the Internet, and the knowledge economy, and That provides untold benefits. I don't think you can really compare it to the prior type of industrial labor that most people at this income level would be exposed to. Ken, I just met in Lebanon. About a month ago we launched a pilot program training Syrian refugees in digital work skills. I think it's a brilliant model because these skills are portable. So no matter where they end up they can still use them. And Ken left Kenya for the very first time, got on a plane for the first time, and this guy from [ UNKNOWN ] slum is now training Syrian refugees in Lebanon in digital work skills. So, that is the potential of this kind of model. and that's what makes me so excited about it. How optimistic are you that people in Silicon Valley where you and I live, Want to quote unquote make the world a better place versus create a sticky app. Well, [ LAUGH ] [ LAUGH ] With one notable exception, whose name I won't mention onstage here, most of Silicon Valley was kind of appalled by what happened in the presidential election and fought really hard, I think, to ensure that The values of Democracy and freedom of speech and, I won't go into more detail on this but most of Silicon Valley, I think, is pretty progressive socially. And many people that I've talked to in the valley are in favor of models like basic income which is something that I was surprised by. One of the leaders of Y Combinator, which is a Platform for new startups is really actively involved in this model of basic income cash transfers to low- income people, as a substitute for welfare payments, which is now being experimented with in many parts of the world. So I think there's a real will to do something, I think we still focus probably too much time and energy on problems that just affect the 1 %. But there are many social innovators now doing interesting work in the valley. And I think we feel the moral imperative now that there's a bit of a political vacuum for this kind of leadership. We're realizing that it might be up to the private sector in the same way that it was up to the private sector during apartheid. To take that sort of leadership that, that political leaders weren't often taking. So, I think it's up to many of us in this room to, to create the change we wanna see in this world. Well, the holy father asks us to come up with specific suggestions about what business can do to elevate global poverty, and I think you'll all agree with me that Layla [ UNKNOWN ] has described one such suggestion to us this morning. Thank you so much. Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

The co-founder &amp; CEO of LXMI and CEO of Samasource talks about her profitable non-profit and how it’s bringing good paying work to slums worldwide.