Leila Chirayath.
Leila is the founder and CEO of Samasource, an award-winning social enterprise that leverages business process outsourcing to alleviate poverty through sustainable job creation in Africa and rural Asia. She first developed the idea behind Samasource while working as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners, where her clients included global leaders in the outsourcing, telecom and healthcare sectors. Prior to Katzenbach, Leila held consulting and research positions at the World Bank's Development Research Group and Ashoka, a global nonprofit that supports social entrepreneurs.
Leila is a veteran social entrepreneur. In addition to leading Samasource, she was involved in the formation of Incentives for Global Health , a global consortium of researchers and businesspeople developing a market-based mechanism to fund pharmaceutical research and development on diseases of the poor. She has written and spoken on business- and technology-oriented approaches to poverty alleviation for various institutions and publications including the Stanford Africa Business Forum, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, the Harvard International Development Group, and the Journal of Peace Psychology. She is a visiting scholar at the Stanford Program on Global Justice and holds a B.A. in African Development Studies from Harvard University.
