WORK
Give Work
Janah's 2017 book Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time — the argument that dignified employment, not charity, is the most effective path out of poverty, and the manifesto of impact sourcing as a global practice.
Give Work (Penguin, 2017) is Janah's sole book and the distilled articulation of the philosophy she had operationalized at Samasource over nearly a decade. The argument is simple, direct, and deliberately confrontational toward the aid industry: poverty is not primarily a condition of incapacity but a condition of institutional exclusion, and the most effective response is not to transfer resources to the excluded but to connect them to markets that compensate their capabilities. Charity, Janah argued, can stabilize crises but cannot produce dignity; only work can do that, and only work that is dignified — adequately compensated, professionally developmental, institutionally supported — can produce sustained poverty reduction. The book became a reference text in impact investing and international development circles and the manifesto of the approach Samasource had pioneered.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book positioned itself against the dominant frameworks of international development that had spent decades treating affected communities as populations