This post originally appeared on LinkedIn Pulse on January 29, 2020.
One of the people I admired most in this world passed away recently: Leila Janah, 37, a social enterprise legend-in-the-making. If you didn’t know about her, you need to know.
Leila Janah was best known as the Founder and CEO of Samasource, a social enterprise that has created thousands of jobs for primarily low-income professionals in East Africa by training them in the skills to serve as a digital workforce for some of the biggest companies in the world. In my mind, Samasource is one of the biggest success stories we have in social enterprise – sitting on the leading edge of what a truly impact-driven, for-profit company could look like.
She was also the founder of Samaschool, which provides the training developed out of Samasource for low-income freelancers worldwide, and more recently LXMI, a luxury skin care brand that employs women from poor communities in the Nile Valley as the engine of its supply chain.
Basically, she was a force of nature – showing not once but multiple times that this social enterprise thing really works (sorry, Anand Giridharadas).
That markets can be harnessed to benefit and uplift poor communities rather than just extracting value from them and transferring it straight to the top.
In fact, she was just proving it again through the announcement that Samasource had closed its Series A round at $14.8M, a resounding affirmation that this model was working and has significant potential to scale.
But now she’s gone.
Though we worked in the same field and lived in the same region, I only got to see Leila in person once, when she was the keynote speaker at the Global Social Venture Competition in 2018. There were several things that stood out from that talk, but oddly what I remember the most was her beginning by saying she had lost this same competition years ago when she was just starting out.
“What I always tell entrepreneurs,” she said, “is that ‘failure is a temporary state. It is not a permanent condition.’” She had come a hell of a long way since then.
But now she’s gone.
Though I do believe that death, like failure, is a temporary state. There is no life without death and there is nothing at all except this eternal transition from one state to another.
Even so, it is very hard to shake the feeling that she is gone too soon. Maybe that’s just how we inevitably feel about all of the people we love and admire, but I feel it particularly because of our dire need in this moment for a thousand, a million Leilas to bend this global capitalist system away from total catastrophe.
I am left wondering what I am really doing to try and live up to her example. That sometimes corrosive feeling of "you're not trying hard enough" has re-emerged, as it often does when someone else's greatness is senselessly cut short, and now I want to snatch it up and nurture it for as long as I can.
Because I am also deeply grateful that her legacy—and the legacy of everyone who helped build and now carry the Sama family of organizations forward—is one that shows that this shit is working. We can have a different economy, if we want it.
Probably her most recognizable quote, which is also at the center of the message behind her book, Give Work, is, “talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”
That idea gets right to the core of why I do the work that I do. I believe that unleashing opportunity, the type that drives meaningful, dignified, and financially sustainable work, is the way I can be most helpful in this world. I am passionate about giving and reforming philanthropy and I invest a lot of my spare time in that effort, but the reason most of my days are committed to supporting social entrepreneurs is because we cannot just give; we cannot just redistribute; we must create something new.
And we must be more like Leila.
Rest in peace and we will see you again in the next economy.