Background
Janah was born on October 9th, 1982 in Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls, and grew up in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California.
founder Chief Executive Officer of Samasource
Janah was born on October 9th, 1982 in Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls, and grew up in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California.
She attended the California Academy of Mathematics and Science.
While at Harvard, she consulted to and authored papers for the World Bank"s Development Research Group and Ashoka on social and economic rights. Upon graduation, Janah worked as a management consultant with Katzenbach Partners. Janah left the firm in 2007 to become a visiting scholar at Stanford University with the Program on Global Justice, founded by law professor Joshua Cohen.
That year, she co-founded Incentives for Global Health with Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale, and Aidan Hollis, a Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary, which established a blueprint for incentivizing the development of new drugs for neglected diseases.
In 2008, she launched Samasource (then called Market for Change), an idea that was inspired by her experiences at the World Bank and in field work in Mozambique, Senegal, and Rwanda while she attended Harvard. Janah got her first contract for SamaSource with a company called Benetech, a non-profit social enterprise that provides technology solutions.
Janah is a frequent speaker and panelist at technology and social innovation conferences including the 2010 Web 2.0 Summit, Clinton Global Initiative conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Tech4Africa. Janah has advocated for alleviating poverty by empowering the world"s poor as producers of goods and services in the global economy, saying that "the greatest natural resource in the world that has been overlooked is the brainpower at the bottom of the pyramid." Her work has been profiled by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Scientist, as well as Columbia Broadcasting System, Cable News Network, Public Broadcasting Service, British Broadcasting Corporation, and National Public Radio.