ORGANIZATION
Samasource
The training-data company Janah founded in 2008 — East Africa's largest, employing 2,500 workers across Kenya, Uganda, and India — that proved talent was universal and then, after her death, demonstrated the fragility of institutional commitments that require continuous human stewardship.
Samasource (later renamed Sama) was the operational vehicle through which Janah tested and proved her hypothesis that talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. Founded in 2008 with a $50,000 grant, it grew into East Africa's largest training-data company, serving twenty-five percent of the Fortune 50 and providing the human annotation work that taught the machine-learning models at Google, Microsoft, Walmart, and eventually OpenAI and Meta what they knew. The organization employed more than 2,500 workers at its peak and claimed to have lifted over 50,000 people out of poverty. It also became, after Janah's death in January 2020, the subject of academic research and worker lawsuits documenting conditions — low wages, insecure contracts, content-moderation trauma — that contradicted nearly every principle Janah had articulated during her lifetime.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Samasource's founding hypothesis was that workers recruited from Nairobi's Mathare Valley, Kibera, and Dandora — communities systematically written off by the