What Works to Lift the Poor

What Works to Lift the Poor Leila Janah

Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time

Penguin Random House, New York, 2017, 272 pp., $27

The world economy faces multiple challenges today. Growth prospects in advanced economies have dimmed. Many emerging market and developing economies feel the pinch from lower prices of oil and other commodity exports, resurgent debt levels, and gaping infrastructure needs. And threats from income polarization, climate change, and the mechanization of jobs continue to test the ability of policymakers to fulfill the dreams of economic security for their people. That is especially true for the poor, many of whom were left behind even when times were generally good.

While ending poverty has been a global imperative for several decades, achieving this goal has proved incredibly hard. Strong economic growth in developing economies like China and India helped pull several millions out of poverty, but history has shown that growth alone cannot always do it. Indeed, some 700 million people around the globe still subsist on less than living wages.

Give Work by Leila Janah, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Samasource, which connects impoverished people to digital work, provides a fresh take on tackling poverty from a social entrepreneur’s standpoint. The author argues that reversing poverty will require creating productive jobs for the poor that help break the cycle of despair and impoverishment once and for all. Giving jobs directly to the poor can have more traction than giving governments aid that can be misallocated or wasted, the author says.

Although Janah’s views are not necessarily new, the book is compelling through the evidence provided. The narrative is a personal account of the challenges the author needed to surmount before founding Samasource to target and train the poor for work outsourced by big companies. Getting there was not easy and demanded resilience, learning and persistence, and customizing a business model to work in different countries under different circumstances. Today Samasource has transformed the lives of about 35,000 of the world’s poorest people in...