CONCEPT
Impact Sourcing
Janah's operational model for connecting workers in marginalized communities to dignified digital work — not charity but <em>market-based employment</em> at living wages, with the institutional apparatus that converts tasks into careers.
Impact sourcing is the practice Janah pioneered through Samasource: the deliberate routing of digital work — data entry, annotation, content moderation — to workers recruited from low-income backgrounds who had been systematically excluded from the global technology economy. The term was not hers alone; the Rockefeller Foundation had used it since 2011. But Janah gave it operational substance. Impact sourcing, in her practice, required building an entire institutional apparatus around the technology platform: training that extended beyond technical skill to professional formation, quality frameworks that could be culturally adapted, management structures that bridged continents, and a values-based commitment to compensation that the outsourcing industry treated as optional. The approach proved that talent was universally distributed and that markets could, under the right institutional constraints, distribute dignity alongside income.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Impact sourcing inverted the assumptions of the mainstream outsourcing industry, which had historically treated cost minimization as the governing metric. Janah's insistence that workers recruited from Nairobi's Mathare Valley or Uganda's