Leila Janah
Sama Group & Laxmi
Founder & CEO

Leila Janah is an award-winning social entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Sama Group, a family of impact enterprises dedicated to ending poverty and promoting social and economic justice. Laxmi is her latest venture under the Sama umbrella with the same mission: to Give Work.

Leila is passionate about creating a social impact and strongly believes that there is so much potential to fix a lot of the problems and issues the world faces through using techniques adapted from the private sectors. She founded Sama Group in 2008 which has grown three successful social ventures and helped cultivate a new industry, Impact Sourcing. Their focus is on poverty alleviation and access to health care, and they have successfully moved twenty-seven thousand people above the poverty line since they started by pioneering a new model called Impact Sourcing, which is using technology-based jobs to provide opportunity to people in very poor locations.

In 2014, Leila launched Laxmi, a luxury beauty brand that aims to enable their producers to earn at least three times the local average wages. Through this venture, as with all Sama Group enterprises, Leila aims to end global poverty by connecting the world’s poorest people to dignified work – impact sourcing.

Prior to Sama Group, 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, an initiative to increase R&D spending on diseases of the poor, and a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.). She has also worked at the World Bank and as a travel writer for Let’s Go in Mozambique, Brazil, and Borneo. 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 in 2014, was the youngest person to win a Heinz Award.