Samahope Uses Crowdfunding to Provide Surgical Procedures to the World’s Poor

By: Talha Bhatti  |   November 5th, 2012   |   Business, Health, Living, News

Leila Janah, the founder of the non-profit Samasource, has co-founded another ambitious initiative called Samahope. Janah’s first endeavor provided women and young people digital work so they could support themselves while her latest project is also providing hope to people that require life saving surgery. Samahope is a crowdfunding initiative that gets people in need medical treatment that they would otherwise not be able to afford.

 

Janah states that, “There are millions of people who need corrective surgeries that we take for granted in the West.” Most people living in the developed world do not have the need for many of the required surgeries because those ailments and conditions do not exist anymore in those countries.

 

Samahope has a total of 70 profiles that need funding and several have already been completely funded. The point of the site is to help girls so that they can reintegrate back into society and she can attend school. If she gets an education, a girl can then work and in turn help improve the conditions of her country. Janah also adds that the site is another way for the girls to have their voices heard. “They want to say what happened to them, to tell their own stories.”

 

Janah’s first startup, Samasource, recently got a $7.5 million injection of cash led by The MasterCard Foundation and other philanthropists. However, Samasource is only tackling one aspect of the problem says Janah; “The scale of the problems can seem so great compared to the resources you have to address them.” That’s why she has turned to the crowdsourcing technique to help fund surgeries for the women on her site.

 

As of right now Samasource is a hot startup but it still has a lot to prove. Janah states that, “We’ve gotten the microwork model on the agenda of a lot of foundations and government entities. We just have to prove it can scale.”

 

She concludes by saying that, “It’s about looking down and doing what’s in front of you. Truly savor it. Then do the next thing. My job is to make sure we’re all going in the right direction, and at the end of the year, the sum of those steps adds up to something really great.”

 

Source: Fast Company