Author of the excellent book, give work, reversing poverty one brick at a time. Laura tyson, phd will be the moderator. Here is a challenge. Turn to someone you do not know in introduce yourself to get started. More fun with a new friend. [inaudible conversations] okay. That is like the perfect 32nd friendship. All right. Lets come back. This is our kind of audience. I hope you are like this when it comes to Live Audience questions. In exciting news we are the second event to take place in this auditorium. [cheering and applause] that is worth a round of applause. We are freshly moved into a brandnew home where 114 years old and we have been renting. This is really nice. Were incredibly excited and its possible because of donors and members like volunteers and attendees like you. Thank you for showing up and giving us a reason to build a brandnew building. Anyones first time here at the club . For people who do not know we are a nonprofits we can only do this and by this i mean more than 400 programs a year with our members and our donors and volunteers. Membership includes perks like discount to tickets like event like this, advance notice of exciting events, lots of other benefits so if you are interested in your front desk staff help me to talk or check your emails tomorrow for a Discount Code on membership. Other great things coming up, october 24 actress gabrielle union, october 2025th eric piece, november 2nd a new cookbook and overnight we are hearing from the artist and writer of the graphic novel about drone warfare. We cover all of the pieces here at the club. Tonight, like i said, all of you talk to folks that have questions for lila and laura, there will be a microphone at the back left for the last 15 minutes and even start lining up. You are not million with questions, they are short, dont include personal stories and the end with a . Laura is a professor and i have a feeling she will crackdown if you get longwinded. We are Live Streaming tonight on facebook and for any of your friends who couldnt be here for free to share it and we are at the Commonwealth Club and will be lightning and lila and lauras handles are on the right and left so please chime in. Who you really want to hear from i would love to introduce to the stage. Please welcome leila janah and laura tyson. [applause] good evening. It is nice to be a lovely space. Ive been in San Francisco a long time and when i first came years ago i did do things the Commonwealth Club. Its lovely to continue that tradition. Its a great pleasure to serve as your moderator tonight. We have an outstanding and inspirational leader, entrepreneur, ceo and founder of a Nonprofit Organization but also ceo and company ceo and founder of how do you say this . Do you use the acronym or and so we are here today to talk about her work in both areas and also to help her launch her new book which he have here. I am married to a writer and its very important that we buy books. [laughter] i will be buying a book. I hope that you will get a preview of what is in the book in our conversation. Following the discussion there will be a reception in there will be books available. There are so many questions that one could ask leila. She has accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. In my conversation with her backstage she has already been thinking about next steps and what she can do. She is a great inspiration. I want to start with the company that we first pounded, the one that gets a lot of attention, deservedly so. I want to start with if you are doing an elevator pitch, described its mission so that everyone has the kind of sense of what it is that this is trying to do. Can you give us that . I have my head of communications me in front. This is like live judging. It means balanced and our mission is to connect low income people to work through the internet and move them out of poverty. We do that in an interesting way. We work with Large Data Services or Large Technology enterprises to provide Data Services like image tagging and other content services that boost their product offerings. We are now, for example, doing the image tagging that powers self driving cars for a few prominent automakers. Given that mission you have to link up to a number of different organizations. You have to link to the individuals who you want to help find these jobs. You have to find them, train them, link them, too, and then you have to find all of those other organizations and their jobs. And you are using the internet. Talk a little bit about the challenges or the ways you go about that. How do you find a set of jobs and how do you find the people that you want to help train connect sure. I will start on the side of the people that we help train. I got into this and ive been working in africa for many years and Study Development economics and felt like the most part a way to help people was to give them a living wage jobs. One of the best ways to do that in the modern era is the technology. All of a sudden you have a way to connect with someone living in a very poor part of the world with a job in the rich world so they can make a lot more money than they could make doing anything else selling to a local market. Theoretically very powerful. I thought to myself what if i created a company that only recruited people who came from very poor backgrounds which is obviously an unusual recruiting criteria. It might even be illegal sometimes. In our case, we only were two people who make less than two or 3 a day. The average income of all of the workers at is about 2. 20 a day which means that prior to working with us if they are employed at all its in the informal economy doing things like literally working in a quarry, breaking big rocks into smaller rocks so its an actual job that had someone for or selling stuff by the side of the road you have another worker who would literally brew a local kind of moonshine and sell it on the street to make a buck 50 a day so these are the source of jobs and we recruit them and partner with local nonprofits and its an abundance of them and in the slums of nairobi where we work and the train basic computer skills and of that report to work in fulltime and the other our sales team cringes sometimes when i get into the details of our workers backgrounds because the stories they pitch to our clients is we are a high Quality Data Service form and we provide Training Data to the best companies in Silicon Valley and the man advanced concerning working at the forefront of technology. For example, the worker that i mentioned to use to do this moonshine trained people to tag images for one of the most prominent Auto Companies in the country working on self driving cars. Believe it or not, that work we can train someone to do in a relatively short period of time because your broken down the Big Technology projects into small units of work. That is how it works. Our fundraising operation here in the bay area is focused on high quality delivering results, being a Competitive Price and on the back and it looks very different from what people might imagine in the sense that we are only recruiting people from very poor backgrounds to do the work and we are paying living wages along the way your outward facing links here and these companies have big projects and they have lots of ways they might source labor. I assume most of the labor is being sourced on a project basis, not longterm project contracts so why would they and what is your pitch for why they should come to you . There must be other ways you can source this type of talent. I used to say fight poverty and get your work done and obviously that didnt work well for most product managers in the bay area. Luckily, i got wise enough to hire better salespeople than me who sort of educated me on how we win these contracts and first Value Proposition we put forward is here the highest Quality Service provider. Interestingly, when you hire people for marginalized backgrounds, i think especially in the people with various works, they had no other formal Work Opportunities and they take this extremely seriously. Will show up early to work. They are interestingly like people often ask isnt it hard to train people from the background, how do they show up and the least of our problems are workforce. Its incredible. These are the most motivated people. They are incredibly loyal to an employer that is willing to quickly pay far and above what they make doing anything else and as a result quality is something that we can sell as a major attribute. We dont and the social Mission Peace comes in after we have permits the client that we offer the best services. In terms of cost, we are not the cheapest option but increasingly for someone who is in charge of developing the next self driving car algorithm or developing a smart chip for your phone to recognize faces and images that person is more concerned with quality often in cost and wants to make sure that the data that is going into training this algorithm is good data and so that is how we went. I think that is actually what most social enterprises should work on rather than selling the customer on the social mission talk about the trojan horse and you have to sneak in the sustainability and its nice and its the icing on the cake. Thats an interesting point. In your work you talk about the importance of and its a term i have not heard for so i will give you credit for, impact sourcing which is that there are companies out there that for whom the social mission say of sourcing this job for this type of population or sourcing for diversity or sourcing for some positive social mission has become more important. So, it is interesting that essentially that secondary and it guess it should be to the quality of labor. You can make the social case but the social case is an addon. You get the highly professional committed, welltrained individual to be part of a team and in addition you are addressing a social mission. I pick it makes it sticky. To be honest, all other things being equal as long as you are sure the vendor is giving you quality results why wouldnt you choose the vendor which is also fighting poverty and what we find is that when people get embedded in these contracts with us i have had so many stories of people who work in Big Tech Companies who told me literally leila, i was going to quit and demotivated and wanted to do something more meaningful than work at this venture backed startup or tech company and then we hired samasource and worked with people who were moving out of poverty to places like kenya, india, haiti and i feel like i have purpose again when i come into work. I can name names of people who stayed two years longer at their Product Management job, the companies because they felt more motivated to come to work every day and i think at some point we should quantify that intel that to our customers. Its exciting because your book site of people in this room know there are statistics indicating that certainly for millennials that meaningfulness of their work, as well as the technical challenges of their work, that those things determine the stickiness, whether theyre loyal or not to the job. Some of these project workers in these Tech Companies as you said, left but the combining of the mission with the work is very important. Particularly, for millennial and the younger generation. I also use code medications did a 80 millennials only want to work for a company that has a Strong Social mission and increasingly thanks to technology we are able to discern Whose Mission is full of fluff and who is delivering. More and more we can show what the factory on the floor actually looks like. We can show the results of income surveys for the workers in the factory and it becomes harder and harder to create a glossy csr page that doesnt translate what the company is doing. Theres more and more work we can do on these metrics and i agree with you. They are compelling. Before we move on to other questions i want to talk about what i think is something called some of school which is related to samasource and may be doing similar activities in the us and given the conversation about the ability to create meaningful jobs for workers in various farflung poverty places in the us is samaschool involved in that and how . Yes, im so glad you brought that up. I own a lot of domains. Recently we have samasource and samaschool. The School Started several years ago and has a funny origin story. We had been running these ads on flu, the Internet Tv Service that highlighted our work in a refugee camp called [inaudible] and it was inspiring, training these destitute refugees to do work for Big Tech Companies and was working and we had this really cute Public Service announcement that iran on that channel and i got the nastiest email as soon as he started running these ads from this guy joe in ohio. Joe in ohio. [laughter] he was emailing everyone. Not, dont a trend joe the plumber. He wrote me an email saying something quite you are ruining america. People desmet you and your kind are ruining america. You are stealing our jobs and sending them to africa and its the middle of a recession and how dare you do this. I read the email and my First Response was so livid and at the time i literally samasource it was nonprofit and i was sleeping on my exboyfriend done at one point and i was so poor myself that he probably thanks im some sort of millionaire sitting in my mansion in San Francisco enjoyed all the profits that i am raking in by sending these jobs to refugee camps. I wrote a nasty email and then i slept on it on the advice of my mentor and the next morning i deleted the email and wrote a nice email back for dear joe, i have looked the unlimited statistics in ohio and i get where youre coming from. Maybe there is somewhere we can adopt our model to work here. Believe it or not joe roback the nicest response and said thank you so much for listening. Im really sorry about the tone of my last email, i lost my job recently and your ad made me upset because i want to do more to create jobs here in america and im feel like were getting left behind. It was an interesting precursor. So it inspired me to go to my board and maybe we could do something here in the us and i think it is important for International Organizations to not be silent. Have this really unfortunate distinction in the nonprofit world people who work for foreign ngos and people who work on domestic poverty and it is tragic because the same issue. Its often same bad guys. We need to Work Together more. We tried a couple of different experiments working in the us and we try to adapt more similar model to what we do overseas here and it didnt work. It didnt work because companies have been outsourcing this work for a very long time already to places like india and china and trying to get that basic Data Services work back on shore is futile. We said okay, what can we do to make sense for america and we looked at the gig economy and it turns out that all net employment growth there is this capped and for study that all growth between 2005 and 2015 has been in the independent work arena so that is contract work basically. Includes all these new gig economy platforms and yet our workforce training in america has no instructions for workers on how to benefit from this and how to connect. Were teaching people to jobs who have gone away ten years ago and we said what if we focus on the finer learnings in the tech world to create curriculum to teach people how to benefit from these new gig economy platforms which sometimes get a bad rap. Look, the data speak for itself and we are not going to ship the whole economy by boycotting one or two waiver platforms and instead of them and figure out how we can provide portable benefits to make sure theyre paid minimum wage and how we can prepare the most marginalized people to benefit from the platforms. That is what samaschool does. The first gig Academy Training or independent worker training for low income americans and we played in San Francisco and [inaudible] that training is going out here and weve seen amazing success stories. People going from 8dollar an hour minimum wage retail jobs for the have no flexibility, no online repetition, they are not getting longterm benefit to making the five or 30 an hour on a platform like field nation or where not only do they get this money they also get the benefit of having an online reputation. If you do a good job on your task desmet you get raises and more clients. That. Whitecollar workers are used to having through linkedin and through employer reference checks but low income people are denied that and i think that is actually the future of job training in this country. It is interesting that story. Right now youre working with the city of San Francisco and i think that one of the interesting ways to imagine this happening is mayors in cities really working to connect because you have to have the connecting organizations as well. You said in your work in your developing economy that if you often work with nonprofits because you have to find a way to connect to the communities of workers that you are serving and they help you do that. I think that in this case having the Mayors Office involved they actually help bring more opportunities to the workers who are going through this. I actually think we could do things like personal, there should be incentives for every City Government to procure social enterprises. Procurement is very big. Lets talk about your midst because i think impact sourcing has a lot to do with procurement as i understand it. Your numbers is we have 12 trillion of procurement going on . And that is just the type to companies. When i did this task last year for the un on ways to empower women around the world and i said to all of the governments in the room, one thing you might do is hear more from the women. That is not that hard of a task. In some developing countries governments are like 30 of the economy in terms of procurement in terms of goods bought and sold. If you want to work with and to bring jobs to those without jobs, the 2 a less or date workers or if you want to bring jobs to the women within that category, you can do that too procurement. Very, very powerful. It simple. You have heard that whole saying teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. First of all, it should be a woman because 90 of their paychecks invest back in the [inaudible conversations] i think it is so interesting that we forget that the best way to help someone isnt to give them a handout which is fundamentally a patronizing relationship. It saying look at me, im superior and i can give you this purpose in this money but its to engage with them on a level Playing Field which is to buy something from him or her. When you purchase something from someone you say i value your contribution and im willing to pay you my hard earned money for what you are able to create. Its a really empowering relationship especially for low income women who are so often in so many ways told they are with us. One of the things that i read when you were talking about your journey, how you got to come up with this was you were young, high school and you went to do some special semester teaching english in a very poor part of the country in africa and the thing that struck you and its triggered by what you said is that people were really poor but they were actually really talented. They were hardworking and they were people who if you gave them an opportunity they would make the most of it. It was their talent but it is not being utilized. How can i possibly create utilization so, i think its an important part of the personal story of how you got to this place. Yeah, so my father is here in the audience and i owe a lot to my fathers judgment and education theres education all right. He would recite. [laughter] he would be like dad, can we more allowance and he would say to my children, luxury is more with us than war. That was one of his favorite lines. Roman poet and we were educated about the stuff and my dad was ascribed to those beautiful new International Calendars that have photographs of people in developing countries and they give you statistics about poverty and he would often remind us that we were here by an accident of birth and that if it werent for that we might easily have been born in the slum in kenya or a rural part of india and we were always told look, you got lucky by being born here not because you are some great gift to the universe because a lot of people could do better than you. Thanks, dad. [laughter] it stuck with me and i got the chance and with such an odd thing, i got scholarship and i was one of those nerdy firstgeneration indian kids who applied for every scholarship in the Counselors Office and i knew that was the only way i can afford to go to school for got the scholarship from of all places the Big Tobacco Company from [inaudible]. I remember they sent a 10000dollar check in the mail to my house and my mom opened it and said you have a 10000dollar check from a Tobacco Company and it was the scholarship for Community Service that i had done in high school. At the time i really wanted to have an adventure and leave home and i was restless it was brought Community Service. You could take it and go to africa. It was for work done in high school and was for a scholarship and i convinced the Scholarship Committee and my guidance counselor that would be far more educational for me to graduate early and go off to and i found this program and donna teaching english and id love to say that this was a saintly motivation but it was motivated by the desire to have an adventure. I showed up in ghana thinking i would help all of these poor african children learn english and my students was into pvc radio and spoke english they could name us senators and they could talk about bill clintons official state visit to africa. They were more knowledgeable about Global Affairs than most of my high school classmates. Yet, they were all from 2dollar a day or under families and it was a school for blind kids imagine, hard enough getting an education in west africa and imagine doing that when you additionally have this disability. What struck me most about this community was that i had grown up thinking my brother and i were beneficiaries of the american dream. We were born here, went to great schools, Public School all our lives, we both had scholarships, people did odd jobs to make ends meet and i assume that if you had the will and skill to work that you could make it. It never really dawned on me what life is like for the vast majority of extremely talented people who happen to be born living in squalor. It really means a life of in my mind, avoidable suffering that should not happen in 2017. We have all the means in the world to fix this problem but its a matter of distribution. You say that clearly an attorney. As a matter of distribution and controlling or affecting the distribution of resources and i completely agree. You told a human story about joi think, for this audience talk about a couple of lives that you have affected in africa. What has happened to these workers as you found them into their families . I assume you are tracking whether the benefits are sustainable, meaning that they continue over time well, ill start with the macrolevel and talk about the data we have a member of her impacting here but one of the things i worked in the world bank and we used to work in the Development Research group which is this think tank the reports on two people read. Yes, i read them. [laughter] so i would turn out this data and one of the things i learned early on was if you want to have a credible approach to fighting poverty you have to have Credible Data around it and the more objective the data the better. We were lucky enough to have all of these herbal resources. Muhammad yunus just came out with a book as well, the pioneer of micro finance worked extensively with the world bank to come out with the poverty index. Its hard to measure Poverty Levels in places where they dont have the cash economy. You literally have to go around and measure assets and look at see what roof and floor they might have to ascertain what Poverty Level they are in. We do that and we do baseline surveys of all of our workers to understand what income level they have at the point where they join us and we do sixmonth surveys. But for all of the income dependence, many of these workers are supporting five or six people in the family right, family members. And we actually track a what they spend their money on. Oh, you do. Uhhuh. And so we publish all this data. And we even consider. Thats fantastic. Theyre sort of the equivalent of quarterly investment calls where we talk through these numbers and try to help people make sense of them. And lastly, i think importantly in this space, theres a new trend around impact auditing and randomized control trials. Right. So really measuring, in the same way we would measure the efficacy of a new drug by doing a controlled experiment, we can now do that with Poverty Reduction programs, which is incredibly important if you think about it. Youre subjecting people to a program [laughter] which may or may not work, and its important to make sure your Program Works before you solicit grant funds to employ it. Is we just embarked on an rtc, and we did our first thirdparty impact audit which the results were published earlier this year, and we did really well. Great. Thats fantastic. So these randomized this is an effort to, basically, really look at effectiveness by it takes some time because youre basically comparing your intervention with a nonintervention and trying to see the extent to which it really affects things. And theyre go ahead. I was going to share a story. Yes, yes, please. I did the political thing, now i [laughter] well, you were appealing to me, the economist. The macro stuff is great, but the stories. Trying to be a good student here. [laughter] i share this story a lot because its just kind of stranger than fiction. I met this young man named ken in nairobi, and its one of those places that looks like a postapocalyptic movie setting. How many of you saw the movie everything ly elysium . 500 years from now the earth has devolved into a massive slum, and all the rich people have moved to another planet its kind of that way right now. [laughter] the saddest thing about this movie is both the slum scenes and the rich people scenes were both filmed in modernday mexico city. So think about that. But mathari really looks like a scene out of one of these movies. It is a place where you see open sewers and beautiful Young Children playing outside, people are dying of multidrug resistant tuberculosis, collar outbreaks cholera outbreaks. Its a setting that shouldnt belong in the modern world. And in this slum there are under, i think, between 800k and a Million People living, and one of them used to be this guy with, ken. And i met him outside of his home in the slum just after hed started working for [inaudible] and he introduced me to his home. There was an open sewer right outside. His beautiful daughter was playing right next to the sewer. He was living in a mudwalled hut with a tin roof. Just one tiny room in which he tried to cook. Hed bring, like, kerosene to cook which is, by the way, is a major problem. It gives kids asthma and other problems. He told me regularly his home would be broken into, and all of his belongings would be stolen. He told me he was afraid to go to the bathroom off at night because often at night because he could get mugged. So this man, if you met him and hes wearing a business suit here in San Francisco, you would never guess his background. He speaks beautiful english, hes extremely charismatic, showed up early for our meeting, you know, just professional presence. You would never imagine that he came from this background. So it turned out ken had gotten admitted to one of the best boarding schools in knew nairoba full scholarship and had graduated. By the way, before he got selected, he had been orphaned. Hed been an orphan. His mother and seven of her nine siblings had died of ferc. You could not of tuberculosis. You could not make this up. So heres this guy whos managed against every odd that the universe could throw at you to graduate from one of the best schools in nairobi x you think, okay, great. Now hes going to get a job and change the trajectory of his family, except that in nairobi theres 70 youth unemployment. No jobs. Yeah. Especially not for a kid from the slum. So he finishes his high school, and he goes back to the slum. Wow. After weve made this Huge Investment in his education. And so often as donors we think, okay, education is the answer, but if there are no jobs after the, you know, education, then whats the point . Be its almost, in some ways, worse because people are aware of what theyre missing. So ken moves back to the slum. The only job he could [audio difficulty] he actually took me to where they brew it. And its these guys, i met another guy who was brewing this moonshine who had a degree in i. T. From a western Kenyan University and who was forced to live in the slum because, again, theres no jobs. So here are these talented young people who have so much to offer, who are so motivated literally dredging up sewer water to brew this horrific moonshine. They mix it with kerosene. Ken told me people in the slum drink it to forget themselves. Its like sniffing glue. So these guys are selling this stuff by the side of the road. Meanwhile, you know, our typical idea of someone whos selling this kind of stuff is theres no way they could have a real job. We never would imagine up someone whos selling moonshine by the side of the road in a slum in the middle of nairobi is someone capable of doing work for google, and yet thats exactly what happened. Ken gets into one of our feeder programs, its a Computer Training Program in the slum. Quickly does well, gets hired to do data entry, does well. And finally, ill just fast forward, last year, in december, i went to beirut because we had Just Launched a Training Program with the World Food Program to train Syrian Refugees in digital work skills. And ken had taken his first flight out of the country to be the leader of this project. So now ken has trained over 500 people in digital work skills from math, so you have a budge. How do you finance the operation, and why is it a nonprofit . I mean, you know, you could have made it a b corp. , you could have made it a forprofit. Youve so tell me a little bit about the Financial Model. And then related to that, its sustainability. Do you think its on a do you worry about the Financial ModelGoing Forward . Do you need to tweak it in some way . So ill start by saying that we have a problem in the u. S. Which is i think were still very unevolved when it comes to business models. We have, on the one happened, profitmaximizing corporations, and then on the other hand, charities. And what we think about when we think about these two models is, you know, make all the money we can doing whatever we need to do including polluting the stream and employing slaves and literally things that companies, Big Companies still do. And then maybe well donate money at the end of the day over here to this Charity Model where you have these nonprofits which are really illequipped to handle these big problems and subsist entirelien on grants and donations. And thats the traditional business we have of idea we have of business and charity. But really all the impact work is happening in the middle in this new space of social business. And b corporations live in that space, a lot of earned revenue nonprofits earned revenue nonprofits. Nonprofits that are getting a stream of revenue from Business Operations that support the mission. There are so many amazing ones. We have clan city street here in the city, Homeboy Industries in los angeles, old school ca cafe is that what you are . Would you say youre an owned revenue earned revenue earned revenue. Going back into sustaining and building this operation. Yeah. So what weve done is we actually separate the p and l of each of our programs so donors know theyre not subsidizing a contract for moth or Google Microsoft or google. Supporting really very clear social mission objectives. Our business is actually now profitable off of our earned revenue. So all of the operations around that business are entirely covered by the revenue we earn from those contracts, and we just hit that milestone last year after eight years of operations. [applause] so thank you. [applause] so in this blend of sort of taking some grant money, maybe some philanthropic money from donors and then earning revenue, whats the sort of breakdown over all of the whole sum of source . Yeah. Well, we have about a 16 million budget, 15, 16 million. And the majority of that is in your source program. Its the earned revenue its the earned revenue business. Yep. And a small percentage of that, its under a million right now in our [inaudible] program. Were trying to work with City Governments around the country to so they would sign on and, basically, buy support the training. Exactly. Or buy a license. Okay. And were actually thinking about different business models. We actually just took our first equity investment. As a nonprofit, we own a subsidiary. Our work center is in the countries that we operate in. For example, in kenya that work center is a forprofit business that we basically wholly owned as a nonprofit, and we just sold some equity in that business to a european impact investor. So theres all these new new ways. Hybrid models. I think it used to be that foundations, the people that ran the finances for the foundations were entirely divorced from the mission people. Yes. So youd have foundations literally investing in Tobacco Companies and all these things that are creating the very problems that then nonprofit side of the foundation is trying to solve is. It makes no sense. So really what we need to see is convergence. We need to see the investments were making are in businesses that not only a avoid doing bad, but actually proactively do good. And i have a great example of this. I just got off the phone yesterday with a person from conservation international, one of the leading conservation organizations. Theyre now investing in companies that build Sustainable Business models around protecting wild assets. So, for example, Companies Like runa, the tea company thats sourcing i think from the amazon and ecuador a rare ingreed cent. Or theres all these new models that show people they can make more money preserving the tree that creates a potentially profitable ingredient than by cutting it down and selling that land to a cattle farmer. So let me ask a question then of, a little bit about your other company. Because the other company you founded is a forprofit. So why did you choose that model . And do you have are there any links between them, or are they totally separate . Entrepreneurial ventures . As you can tell, i have a bit of a sickness for starting things. I first went to my board and was like, okay, i know youre going to think this is crazy, but i have this new idea. And i had come across this really amazing ingredient in uganda so related to this ingredient. Thats what triggered my question was what you just said about you have a real asset that you can protect and actually monetize. So im like i love going to local markets and finding out what local people are using. I came across this heirloom variety of shea butter, and all the women in uganda have beautiful skip because they use this skin because they use this product. Then i find out this nut only grows wild on trees that take 20 years to mature, and those trees only grow in northern uganda, south sudan and parts of ethiopia. So im thinking what an amazing story, how come no one has marketed this as a luxury item. And i remember flying back through dutyfree and looking at the highend chanel skin creams, and i love [laughter] one of the women in my life early on always told me each if youre really broke, always invest in your face, you only have one face. [laughter] so buy the expensive you go through those dutyfree things, and theyve got everything out there. They do. And usually one is look pretty wretched is because you just get off so youre an easy target. So im coming off this flight from uganda, and we always fly through amsterdam, and im looking at skin cream. And i just looked at the ingredient label, and its things like red number 5, yellow number 7, all kinds of horrific chi toxic ingredients, and you realize that many of these things are known carcinogens that are allowed in 200 an ounce jars of skip cream. So were shelling out our money which, by the way, is not going to womenowned enterprises or enterprises that support women in the supply chain. Its literally going to the map. [laughter] for products that dont even, you know, not only do they not do good things for us, but they dont do anything for the world. And so i thought, you know, maybe this is a really interesting opportunity. What if we could build a model in the luxury space. Okay, okay. In luxury you typically have enormous gross margins, often its women who are doing the purchasing. Very few of these products actually benefit women either in the supply chain or as owners, and yet women are doing all of the spending. I thought why not build a brand in this category. So i came back, i talked to my board about it, they were like, okay, fine, do it not here. Just raise extra money on the side. So i decided to donate a third of my personal shares to the nonprofit okay. If you ever have an exit, well do well, and we also set it up, were going i through the its a forprofit. Okay. And the idea is at the time i started the first business, i was agnostic to the structure, i just wanted to build a Company Whose primary mission would be to move people out of poverty. The way we structured it was kind of incidental, and at the time been corps were just getting b corps were just getting formed. I think now the most rich and exciting space is this social business, nonloss and nondividend companies. And its argued that when you are freed from the profit motive of your investors but at the same time p constrained by having to be sustainable as a business right. You need a revenue way exactly. Thats where a lot of really powerful innovation can happen in fields, i think, you know, imagine if we had social enterprise prisons in this country instead of the horrific forprofit prisons that we have. Imagine if we ran so many you know, i think its easy to criticize governmentrun programs, often theyre bureaucratic and inefficient, but social enterprises eliminate that bureaucracy and at the same time dont have, i think, the pressure to deliver profits which can be at odds with well, as you said, the governments can procure from such companies. So actually the ideal thing, some of these things may actually end up being sense write a government sensibly a government mission. It may be a mission of a mayor to have some reTraining Programs to try to get workers skilled and out of the thats a public mission, and there may be some public dollars. But they cant really necessarily do it well, so thats why they can then turn to a sam source or sam school to try to help them. So i think combining procurement or Public Policy dollars with these kinds of institutions is very powerful. So were going to have, open up to questions this five minutes. So i have, like, tons of questions to still ask. I think im going to end with we talked about [inaudible] and in that process we talked about women. So it is the case that there have been a lot of stories lately, horrifying stories really, about whats happened to women in the tech community. Okay . Theyre really now, they are firstworld problems, okay . Theyre not and i know one of your comments, and i agree with it is, you know, we have to worry about thinking about feminism as a firstworld issue. Its a global issue, and some of the problems for women, many of the problems for women are much more extreme when you also combine heavy, heavy disadvantage. And so is, but the point is in your own personal story where youre then amazingly successful, you have really good links with the tech community, youre a entrepreneur, youre raising projects from Companies Like google. Have you encountered have there been any special challenges associated with this, things youve had to deal with . Are there role models who have helped you . Are there, are there mentors who have helped you . I mean, how have you managed in what sounds like a pretty hostile climate to have this success . It can be. And i actually find the form of sexism that i find most problematic is actually paternalism. Pa termism. Like, i cant tell you how many times people have said, oh, thats so sweet, is that your fulltime job . Somebody is asked me that once, and i was like, are you kidding . Or, oh, at a conference where i was, like, speaking as one of the featured speakers, who are you here with . Assuming that i was somebodys girlfriend. Its that sort of thing that constantly undermines your sense of confidence, especially when you get that right before you go on stage. [laughter] and so thats the least of it. I think ultimately, you know, the problem that women in developing countries is very similar to, actually, the problem that women in tech face which is that we dont control the financial resources. That is the biggest issue, you know . If you want to solve the problem, look at where the money is going and who its coming from, and i think thats really at a different scale, but its the same issue everywhere. When i think about role models, one of the people that inspired me to do this work is a woman, a woman named pria haji who started an Amazing Organization called world of good. She was the first of her kind. She realized when she would travel to developing countries and see women who made these beautiful artisal products, the women who make them make, like, ten cents of that. And she realized what if i created a retail brand and bought these products wholesale from these women, paid them living wages and then retailed them as a fair trade kind of model. So she built the first fair trade brand for artisanal goods, and she sold at whole foods, and she was just a force of nature. You could not say no to this woman. So i saw her speak at a nonprofit conference in 2007, and she gave this amazing talk about starting her company which at the time maybe had 40 employees. And i decided that day that i would eventually quit my job and do this full time. And her company then became profitable, she sold world of good to ebay, and they became the first online, fair trade retailer of artisanal goods. Very pioneering. And the other thing about pria that was amazing was as a woman, as a single woman she decided she was going to have a family, and she went about it in an amazing way. She went and had two kids on her own. And i had dipper with her a month beginner with her a month before she tragically passed away. She told me were so often that we need to have this perfect partner and have a family that looks a certain way, and that should be plan a, and Everything Else is plan b. She said is, screw that. Plan a is the life im living now. Ive had an amazing, fulfilling career doing work that benefits other people, and to me thats more important than having a white picket fence existence in the sub is you shoulds. And i sat there looking at her and her beautiful kids and what shed built, and i thought, yeah, thats the way to do it. Luckily, she has a strong family. When she passed away, her kids went to her brother, but she inspired so many of us so many. And she had the doggedness of, like, the most of a Mark Zuckerberg or an elon musk, but applying that same sort of passion and strength to the world of social enterprise which desperately needs more leaders like that. Well, i think you remind me a lot of pria. So both pria and leila went through whats called the Global Social venture competition at ucberkeley which is, i was once dean there, and i would say among the accomplishments of my being dean, one of the things im most proud of is starting this up. Weve built it out. We have all new partners. By the way, we have a new partner in beirut. And whats interesting about that story, of course, is that often times one think think of e thinks of mentors or role models as someone whos like generationally different. In this case, pria has been an inspirational model for people of her generation. And its just a lovely story. I will just end with, you know, one of the things that did come up over and over again in the work we did for the u. N. On how to empower women was the importance of models that you could sort of see a pathway. You could see, okay, i can do this. And that plus also, and this goes to your paternalism, the expectations people carry around about women. So youre in a room and theyre going to be paternalistic because they expect that certain things must be true of you just because youre a woman, and theyre not true. So anyway, fascinating, fascinating story. I have to give up my right of asking questions now to give it to the audience. So we already have some questions lined up right there. Just as a reminder, if you have a question, please make your way up to the mic, and we have our first question here. Hi. Youve got my heart. Are you coordinating with other likeminded organizations like kiva and finka international and the peace corps that has been doing a lot of Small Enterprise Development for Development Success for 50 years . Yes. Im so glad you asked that and, yes. We have coordinated with a lot of them. I had johnny price from kiva zip on, we did a Facebook Live together in the office recently, and premel has been a mentor of ours for many years. And what we try to do with these partners is basically help them implement similar kind of impact sourcing programs. We have a group that we Just LaunchedCall Advisory services where we consult to other nonprofits and help them build Sustainable Business molds around digital world, and were also piloting a really cool program. Its like a again, im going to be accused of being too broad. But we piloted this model where we teach people how to be digital freelancers on sites like upwork, ebay for services. Its a huge marketplace where you can sell your services as a translator or a proofreader or an administrative assistant. Amazing opportunity for someone who happens to live in a poor place but has the skills to do this kind of work. So we just piloted a version of this in nairobi where weve created a coworking space where people can come, they can get this training, and then they start paying once theyve done the training and start earning money, paying to use the space. Oh, okay. And that, if you think about it, can be profitable. You can have an entrepreneur, and as long as the people are earning money by going to the center, then they can afford or to use the space. This can be very powerful in migrant communities, in many parts of the world where we dont have the bandwidth personally to operate. We just met with another big womens Microfinance Organization to see if we can do Something Like that with them. Sure. Great. Hi. Poverty researchers generallingly will divide the poor into the hardcore poor and the transitional poor. The hardcore poor are, i think the population you dont deal with, the drug addicts, the intergenerational poor and then, you know, you have the population that i think youre dealing with. So that means government is left. The very inefficient government is left are with the hardcore poor. Is there any do you have any thoughts on because nobody talks about how inefficient government. I worked for cms, trillion dollar agency, blows 100 billion a year, probably doesnt come close to anywhere. What is happening with the Public Sector . Can you talk about anything thats being done . Because theyre the ones that are dealing with the really deep poor. Yeah. Im so glad you bring that point up. We, i talk about this in the book, but we had been working for many years in a really Poor Community in arkansas called dumas. Its in the Mississippi River delta, and the population there is what you would call hardcore poor. Intergenerational, you know, poverty and generational trauma which, by the way, never gets talked about. If your ancestors went through jim crow and you saw horrific things happening, you know, relatively recently, its hard to imagine that this community can just bounce back from that. So in this area, i mean, it was a fight to get anything done. We couldnt get highspeed internet to this community. I have Better Internet in our center in nairobi than i to in america, in arkansas. We had very big challenges with literacy rates. People would come in speaking far worse english than our workers in nairobi. And it was just, like, layer upon layer of struggle, and finally we realized we dont have the budget to sustain this program, and in order to make it work in this community, we would need a mass i investment in structure, in educational opportunity, in a range of different things. And part of the problem in these rural, farflung communities in the u. S. Is theres no money to sustain them. If you live in poverty in new york city, yes, it sucks, but there are tons of agencies and other resources x theres a lot of wealth around you thats creating institutions that can lift you up. No one is investing in dumas, arkansas. So it was a really tragic decision we had to make to shut that program down and try to transition the program to local agencies. I would say our learning from that is maybe a few things. One is that i think we have a tremendous infrastructure problem in this country, and we dont admit that enough. We cant be, you know, a developed nation and competitive with other countries that are investing massively in, like, s. T. E. M. Education. We dont even have internet in many parts of the country because of the way weve decided to distribute access. I really think procuring through social enterprise, believe it or not. I think if there were mandates that at least governments or ideally corporations could get tax breaks for hiring marginalizedded people, we might see a change. Imagine if for every formerly incarcerated person you hired which, by the way, is a person not going back to prison therefore saving me, the taxpayer, 200 grand a year, this should be a tax benefit for a company thats doing that. I think we should be incentivizing hiring and creating jobs among these people. So many of the incentives i see to bring a company into a new city have no requirements that that Company Actually hire lowincome people from that city. Which, to me, is ridiculous. If my taxpayer dollars are going to subsidize a Company Moving into my city, they should have obligations to hire people so that my tax dollars arent being used to pay for various Government Services they might benefit from. I think this is starting to happen. There are programs like wage subsidies in some more progressive cities, but its certainly happening at, you know, one fact of 1 of the scale that it could be. So those are some ideas, and i wont presume to know them all, but i think we can move the needle with social enterprise. I think theres a fair amount of, theres a lot of bipartisan thinking and support in the incars ration area. In this issue of what are the programs that actually work to get that population as it comes out back into the, into society in the work force rather than recidivism. So thats an area where i actually am optimistic that state and local and maybe even federal dollars can, will be employed. Because theres just a recognition its tremendously wasteful. I mean finish. The only people who are benefiting are private prison companies. Yeah, are prisons. Yeah, are prisons themselves, private and public actually. Hi, leila. My name is geronimo, and thank you so much for speaking tonight. Id hike to know more about what work youre doing with refugees and how youre planning to adapt the model to fit a refugee worker. And when i say refugee worker, i mean when workers are constantly on the move country to country and have very unstable home lives. Such a great question. So we started working with refugees back in 2009 when i got that email. And we started working through a partnership with c. A. R. E. , a large humanitarian agency, i used to be on their board, actually, and they manage all of the, all of the infrastructure in refugee camps. The biggest challenge we face is technically its illegal to hire refugees in many up countries because theyre seen as competing with locals for jobs. Thats the first obstacle. You have this huge pop population of people thats unable to leave the camp and solely didnt on food rations dependent on food rations. It became a big recruiting job for alshabaab terrorists, and its no surprise because people are sitting there living in squalor with nothing to do, no economic opportunity. I think a few things could happen. A lot of people are urging reform for refugee work rights and saying that it is a, you have a right to work, and there are all kinds of, like, temporary Work Programs that are now being piloted that are, i think, really exciting. I think the second thing is equipping refugees with skills that are portable. And one of the beautiful things about digital work is these are skills that you can take with you and apply wherever you happen to be. So weve tried to implement our online version, a Training Program in different refugee communities, and i think that model of getting people to find work on platforms like upwork is very promising. That sector is exploding. And many people that we find in refugee communities are actually fairly well educated and left behind good jobs at home, so theyre more than capable of doing this sort of work. Are some of the refugee organizations, Say International rescue or some of the big ones, are they provide because youve got to do that, you have to have the equipment, you have to have the broadband, you have to have the environment for yeah. So are you working in partnership with yeah. Those organizations . So one of the things that broke my heart was i first went to [inaudible] because aide read this report that said the Norwegian Refugee Council had built these computer programs, and theres one oneroom high school in this camp that is the most depressing thing youve ever seen. People had actually lived their entire lives in this camp and graduated high school in that oneroom high school and then started taking Online University courses in this computer lab that had been set up this with satellite at the time internet. And so when i read that report, i said thats where we have to do our training, and thats where we ended up doing our training. There is internet infrastructure in some of these places. The biggest obstacle is the red tape over regulating where refugees can work thats the biggest problem. We have time for three more questions. Just go in order, and well have to keep the next for the reception. So good evening. I have two questions but im going to try to merge them together. Please. [laughter] so my question is how did someone from outside of the Community Come in and find these individuals who obviously have skills . How do you train them, and is it, like, something you can do on a larger scale basis because training for new jobs is really essential, and three is how do you actually get these products that have Quality Ingredients to be what women want to buy as opposed to chanel which Everyone Wants to buy i still havent cracked that nut, but ill let you know when i do. [laughter] we, okay, ill start with the quality piece. So we actually have a lab in new jersey thats, like, certified, they have all the certifications organic, so we send Raw Materials the them, and they help us formulate. One thing ive learned as a social entrepreneur is the efficacy and the unique selling proposition will sell the product, and the social mission can be a nice addon. So the product has to work. We did, like, clinical testing. I actually sell the products on qvc, which is very surreal. [laughter] and we show, like, before and after photos, and it looks like a typical product. And then im like, by the way, this is also made by low income women in uganda, and youre supporting fair wage practices. So thats on that side. You know, the best thing to do working in these communities is to talk to locals and to find out the organizations that are already successful in recruiting low income people. And what we did was we said, hey, we know you guys already work in the slums. Youre doing all kinds of different empowerment training, but you dont have a way to connect people that go through your programs to work. So we come in and say we can be that provider of work if we can have some influence over the type of computer training youre doing and we give them our curriculum. So weve done that with an ngo called the human needs project where ken now works, and they have this beautiful training facility, and they were really hungry for curriculum that would actually lead to a job at the end. And so so often theres already an ecosystem that you can plug into put reinventing the wheel. So thats really important, because i you didnt mention in that question, but the term scalability always comes up. So the curriculum is something that can be scaled. I mean, if you find the right partners all over the place absolutely. Yeah, thats really we have 50,000 people who have enrolled in our schools on line curriculum from india and the philippines and i think its like 65 cups. And anyone can use that curriculum. I got a report from a friends father, actually, who works in development in ethiopia who used to curriculum to hack together a digital Training Course for somali refugee women. So hes training them, and hes setting them up in a coworking space to go and do work on upwork, and that curriculums available for free. I encourage you all if you want to start a Computer Training Program in ethiopia with our curriculum, please do. Fantastic, thank you. Go ahead. So as more and more jobs are taken by machinery and new technology that we create, what to you do you think that our World Economy had been able to create new jobs to replace all the ones that are being lost . And also what do you think that the government can do to help businesses that are creating jobs in this area . That is the trillion dollar question. And i will say that labor economists, economists in general are quite divided on a. I. , they are. On a. I. I spent some time with these economists who are a little bit, you know, pessimistic about it a little bit. [laughter] yeah. David justice theyve adjusted a little bit. Its really hard speaking with an economist because i cant just throw out my ran. Com ideas as random ideas as facts. [laughter] i factchecked everything. Good. [laughter] so i think the jurys out. So i talk to a lot of people in Machine Learning at our client companies, like ive talked to a very Senior Executive at facebook who works on Facebook Messenger, and i was talking to him about the Facebook Messenger chat bots which are emerging, and i was like, you know, are these just going to take over all the Customer Service jobs . He said its going to be a very long time. We need to create so much Training Data, theres going to be lots of jobs in creating that data. I think the future is in figuring out how your role will eventually interact with a computer. And how you can make the most of that hybrid, right . And i think what were going to see is just is like what weve seen with [inaudible] when i started out doing this work, we were doing data entry. We were literally converting pdf files into text files. Now that can entirely be done by software at a very High Accuracy level, and thats just happened in the last seven years, right . So as weve grown the business, weve evolved what kind of services we offer in tandem with how technology is evolving. The best estimate ive heard is like ray kurtz who says the sing lairty, so the moment at which computer intelligence will eclipse human intelligence will happen in, like, 2044. Maybe hes adjusted it a bit. 2044. Put that date in your calendar. Midnight on [laughter] at that point, all bets are off. But at least until then, i think theres still going to be quite a need for humans. And i think the other thing that we should be aware of is that we choose the economic systems that we live in. These are not natural laws. This is not physics. We decide how we want to structure our economic systems. And there was a time in this country during the Works Progress administration when we decided that we were going to massively invest in job creation to do all sorts of things. We had people, i remember discovering this in the library of congress, we had people who were paid by the government to go out and record oral histories in the south. There are entire archives in the library of congress of beautiful spirituals that are sung in black churches in the south that somebody got paid to go and record by the government because we thought it was important to preserve the cultural legacy of the south. These are the types of things webbed choose to be [audio difficulty] childcare centers. We could choose to fund, you know, farmers markets. There are so many things we could choose to fund with a surplus that machines can theoretically create. If we dont have to do all of this, you know, manual labor or even knowledge work and machines can do it for us, bill gates has proposed a robot tax. I think thats a brilliant idea. We can tax the gains that are made by these algorithms and invest that in creating jobs in areas that were not traditionally valued by the economic system, often in things that women do, to be honest. Im just optimistic, i just think its going to take the will to reform our economic systems accordingly. I think those of us who worry about it think everything you say is absolutely true, but i sometimes get involved with technologists who are saying how fast the technologys moving, and im thinking how slow Society Moves to redesign its institutions and policies and social contract and, you know . So were, like, falling behind yep. In addressing new organizational structures, new incentive structures, everything. The technologists are whipping forward. [laughter] all right, one more question. I feel like i have the unpopular question, and i hope its not taken the wrong way. You know, im just wondering how do you help the participants turn their initial training and their first jobs into sustainable and meaningful careers, you know . How do you make sure theyre not taken advantage by the wrong people, people who are trying to [inaudible] commit, like, fraud or, you know, scam . Cheap labor who have these skills. Yeah. Its a very, its a very important and good question, good ending question. And when youre answering that, leyla, you many times use in your work and in your statements the notion of a living wage. So this is a how, thats related to this because youre basically training people, but you want them to end up with a living wage. So yeah. How do you so thats a really good question. Its a really good question. Two pieces. So one is we have to make sure that were paying living wages and that we even know what how to calculate a living wage. How to calculate that. And were not coming up with that ourselves, because that would be biased. Luckily, pria pioneered a model called the fair wage guide which is still in existence. She did. You can look it up at fair wage guide, and she brought together a group of academics at berkeley and around the country, i think, to understand the cost of living in urban and rural areas in every country in the world and to publish a neutral divide for people who are sourcing from developing countries to understand what a living wage should be in that region. So we use that as the floor. At the very lowest we have to pay living wages to our workers immediately upon joining. In addition, we partner with many different nonprofits that provide everything from financial literacy, were working on providing microloans to our workers, we provide health care insurance, we provide food on site, transportation. Its were extremely highly rated by our work force, and is one of the ways you can guard against, i think, you know, maybe the pressure to pay as little is possible is to actually publish and measure your Net Promoter Score. S this is something thats used often in the Consumer Tech world. The best measure of how well a companys doing is how well your clients would recommend it, right . You have a favorite app youre telling all your friends about it all the time. So interestingly, this is really never done in the social sector. I dont know many nonprofits that have a Net Promoter Score where youre actually asking your beneficiaries, did you think we did a good job . We actually do that with our work force, and we publish a lot of the sort of impact data on our site. The second thing ill mention is the knowledge economy is fundamentally different from, for example, basic manufacturing. When you are working in front of a computer and using the internet [audio difficulty] and, you know, the idea of building an online reputation, and when you get a bank account and we actually force our workers to get Bank Accounts because that means theyre part of the formal Banking System which provides all sorts of other benefits. Your life dramatically changes. We even have workers start googling things like what they should be making, what is the average salary for someone in nairobi, you know . It would never have occurred to them to do that if they were working in a factory disconnected from a computer. I think theres a fundamental shift that happens when we move people into the knowledge economy. And thankfully, the data really corroborates that. If you look at the trajectory of our workers in all this data that we publish including thirdparty audits, youll find they tend to stay out of poverty and pretty dramatically so long after they leave us. Thats great. So im left with a question that [inaudible] for tradition, but i think its a very odd question for you [laughter] because i think youve already done it. The question is what is your 60second idea on huh to make the world a better place. On how to make the world a better place. [laughter] actually, you have more than one. Probably your staff is going, oh, no, shes going to come up with another one. Yeah. Okay . But anyway, do you have some new ideas or, basically, i think youre making the world a better place on your old ideas, but [laughter] ill summarize. You know, i think were so often frustrated by what we see in the media and what our politicians are or arent doing. We forget that we vote with our dollars. Every time a cent leaves our bank account, we are choosing the world of we want to live in with the products we buy. When we go to work with our companies, those companies are choosing the world we want to live in by the way they do their procurement. We can literally change the world. In south africa during apartheid, during a span of three years the u. K. Reduced imports of south African Textiles by 35 because consumers said we cannot agree with this unethical regime, and were not going to buy stuff from this regime until they change. And they totaled that empire. Toppled that empire. It happened. So we absolutely have power to vote every second. And the more we to that as consumers, the better world were going to live in. Fantastic. All right. Well, let us all thank this inspirational powerhouse. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want the hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com book. Or post a comment on our facebook page. Facebook. Com booktv. [inaudible conversations]