New York:
Leila Janah, (Leila Chirayath -37), a social entrepreneur who employed thousands of poor people in Africa and India, died on Jan. 24 in Manhattan, the New York Times reported. She died of cancer. She wrote on her Facebook page about the struggles and sufferings as a patient.
New York Times carried an obituary with about 950 words, which is a rare honor.
Leila Chirayath was born in Lewiston, N.Y., near Niagara Falls. Her father, Sahadev Chirayath, is a structural engineer; her mother, Martine Janah, held various jobs. Leila began using her mother’s surname professionally about 10 years ago.
The family moved to Arizona before settling in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Leila Janah is the founder and CEO of Sama and LXMI, two companies that share a common social mission to end global poverty by giving work to people in need. She is also the co-author of America's Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age.
Earlier, Leila was a Visiting Scholar with the Stanford Program on Global Justice and Australian National University’s Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. She was a founding director of Incentives for Global Health, and a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.).
Leila is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a Director of CARE USA, a 2012 TechFellow, recipient of the inaugural Club de Madrid Young Leadership Award, and the youngest person to win a Heinz Award in 2014.
She received a BA from Harvard in African Development Studies
Awards: Heinz Award (2014); Top Ten Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs of 2013 – Fortune; TechFellows Award for Disruptive Innovation (2012); Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls (2012)
In 2005 she traveled to Mumbai, as a management consultant and saw the slums there. She found that not anybody from the slum was employed at the outsourcing center.
She thought that some these tech jobs could be done by the poor people, so that they can earn a living wage. She called the intellect of the poorest people in the world ‘the biggest untapped resource’ in the global economy, the Times report noted.
She started Samasource in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2008 with the aim of employing poor people, for a living wage, in digital jobs like photo tagging and image annotation at what she called delivery centers in Kenya, Uganda and India. At least half the people hired by Samasource are women, the company says.
The company has helped an estimated 50,000 people — 11,000 workers and their dependents .
She also launched LXMI, a luxury cosmetics line for the poor. Begun in 2015, it employs hundreds of poor women along the Nile River Valley, largely in Uganda, to harvest Nilotica nuts and turn them into a butter that is exported to the United States for use in the production of its skin-care products.
When she was in middle school she joined the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. During high school, she went to Ghana as part of an international student exchange program to teach blind children; she learned Braille while she was there.
Janah is survived by her husband, Tassilo Festetics; her parents; a brother, Ved; and a stepdaughter.
