Training the Poor to Do Simple Computer Jobs Wins Nonprofit Leader a Heinz Award

In her first job out of college, Leila Janah worked for the management-consulting firm now called Booz & Company. While on assignment to help a large Mumbai call center go public, she was struck by the ambition of a young man from Dharavi, one of the world’s largest slums, who took calls for British Airways.

Ms. Janah says meeting the young man was pivotal. She realized that there were many bright people like him who could be trained to do jobs that companies usually give to outside contractors.

In 2008, she founded Samasource, a nonprofit that uses the Internet to teach job skills to the poor in eight developing nations and the United States. The group, which trains people to do simple computer-based tasks such as categorizing photos or data, transcribing, or writing descriptions for online shopping sites of companies like Microsoft and Walmart, has created almost 5,000 jobs.

For her efforts, the 31-year-old Ms. Janah is one of five winners of this year’s Heinz Award, a $250,000 prize given by the Heinz Family Foundation to recognize innovation in solving global problems. The prizes were created in 1993 by Teresa Heinz in honor of her late husband, Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania.

Kim O’Dell, director of the Heinz Awards, says Ms. Janah won because her work has opened doors for the neediest and is widely important.

Ms. Janah has crafted “a new way to use the Internet to reach individuals who wouldn’t ordinarily have access to work opportunities and training them to be employed and employable,” Ms. O’Dell says. “It’s applicable to communities everywhere here in the United States and globally.”

Multiplier Effect

Each Samasource participant supports an average of four other people, Ms. Janah says. The wages they earn are usually triple what they could earn elsewhere. Some participants have started their own businesses.

Before she was a management consultant and got the idea for the charity, Ms. Janah worked at the World Bank. She repeatedly heard the same frustrations voiced by the needy people she tried to help.

“The thing I kept consistently hearing was that people were looking for work opportunities more than they were looking for handouts,” she says. “Our approach to international aid and poverty alleviation has been largely about treating people as passive recipients of aid.”

Her organization’s results have helped it grow fast. It now runs on an annual budget of $10-million—half coming from contracts for its workers’ services, the rest from foundation grants and individual gifts.

Samasource has received a $2-million Google Global Impact Award, as well as support from the foundations of Cisco, eBay, MasterCard, and Walmart. But securing financial backing, she says, was tough in the early days.

It took her three years to win a contract from Google, as she plowed through a spreadsheet detailing 70 potential leads at the company. Worries about the charity’s financial straits grew so stressful, she says, that on one occasion she burst into tears and made an emotional presentation at an investor event.

Ms. Janah’s tenacity eventually led to a growing roster of business clients that include Getty Images and LinkedIn—and Google.

They choose her organization, Ms. Janah says, because it meets their bottom line. “We find that the social mission for businesses is icing on the cake,” she says. “We have to prove we have the costs, the quality, and the turnaround time that a normal vendor would.”

Steady Growth

Samasource runs its operations from San Francisco, where its sales team works to win contracts for large digital projects from technology companies. The projects are then broken into smaller tasks and allocated to its centers around the world.

Next, the charity works with local organizations to recruit workers. They receive up to four weeks of computer-based training and English instruction. Once they can perform the required tasks, they begin working and earning money.

The charity’s ambitions keep growing. Ms. Janah created the Sama Group, a cluster of social enterprises. Besides Samasource, the group encompasses SamaHope, a fundraising site that supports doctors who treat women and children in developing countries, and SamaUSA, which gives training to low-income community-college students over a 10-week period to help them find online work.

SamaUSA’s program is now taught at Feather River College, in Quincy, Calif. The organization is also in talks with Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas to bring the program to the economically struggling Mississippi River Delta region.

Ms. Janah plans to use the Heinz prize money to build a company that would use natural ingredients from developing countries to produce luxury beauty products, with female employees sharing ownership.

The prize money will also enable her to do another new thing: save for retirement. The Heinz Award, she says, allows her the “freedom to do what I love for the rest of my life.”

Ms. Janah says thinking about her nonprofit’s success stories keeps her motivated. One program alumna from Nairobi has started her own business writing for websites and now employs women from the same struggling community. A 70-year-old former truck driver in California, who used all of her savings to pay for cancer treatments found work—and a second career—through the SamaUSA program.

“There is a lot of hopelessness in the face of global challenges,” Ms. Janah says. “Every day I get more evidence that people nobody believed in are finding work and making money.”

Other Winners of Heinz Foundation $250,000 Awards to Innovators

Sanjeev Arora, a liver-disease specialist at the University of New Mexico and the creator of Project ECHO, or Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, which uses video-conferencing technology to enable primary-care doctors to treat patients in rural and needy areas with chronic illnesses such as hepatitis C, HIV, diabetes, and psychiatric disorders.

Jonathan Foley, a professor and the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, who studies the environment’s effect on agriculture.

Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit website that offers free tutorials and exercises to students around the world.

Abraham Verghese, a medical doctor and professor at Stanford University, whose best-selling books explore the impact that health crises have on people’s lives.