Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013

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1 Cybele Amado de Oliveira, Chapada Institute, Brazil Chapada Institute has devised an innovative methodology for improving education by engaging parents, educators, and politicians. It provides support and training for continuing education for school teachers and administrators, while simultaneously establishing inter-municipality networks for broad collaboration around educational improvement. The Chapada Institute approach guarantees significant influence on public policy by working with communities to develop education proposals and then presenting those proposals to candidates who must choose to commit their support prior to elections. Since its founding 16 years ago, the Chapada Institute has served about 4,000 education professionals and over 72,000 students. Jim Ayala, Hybrid Social Solutions Inc. (HSSi), Philippines At least 20 million Filipinos lack access to electricity, and tens of millions more have unstable and inconsistent power connections. HSSi has pioneered an innovative ACCESS program to provide rural Filipinos with solar and crank powered technologies for development. HSSi arranges financing through community organizations, organizes local technical support networks, and provides user training to ensure long-term sustainability. To date, HSSi has collaborated with over 40 community organizations across the Philippines to connect about 30,000 individuals to solar power. Mois Cherem Arana, Enova, Mexico In Mexico, 69% of the population does not have access to computers or the internet, severely limiting opportunities in education. Enova s solution to this challenge is the Red de Innovación y Aprendizaje (RIA), or the Learning and Innovation Network. RIA represents a chain of 70 educational centers that provide underserved Mexican communities with quality educational opportunities and access to information technologies. A successful collaboration among social, public, and private sectors, RIA has served more than 350,000 people in low-income communities since 2007, with 3000 new members signing up weekly. Frederick K.W. Day, Buffalo Bicycle Company, USA Rural Africans experience challenges of daily survival: limited water, food, and fuel, as well as inadequate access to education and healthcare. With transportation, access to these elements can be greatly enhanced. Compared to walking, a bicycle transport quintuples carrying capacity and quadruples travel distance while saving time. The Buffalo Bicycle is a robust, purpose-built bicycle designed specifically for African terrain and load requirements, and more than 45,000 have been sold to individuals and organizations. Another 70,000 bicycles have been granted using a unique work-to-own model.

2 Reese Fernandez-Ruiz, Rags2Riches, Philippines At the Payatas landfill in the Philippines, enterprising women scrounge for scraps of cloth for weaving rugs. Recognizing the women s work ethic, but also the challenges they faced in earning a living wage, Rags2Riches was founded to connect these women directly with garment factories and markets. Rags2Riches has expanded its activities beyond Payatas to provide a fully integrated and sustainable livelihood platform to communities that seek to increase incomes, gain access to social services, and build a roadmap for their families to get out of poverty. In addition, Rags2Riches has partnered with top Filipino fashion designers to build a high-end brand with great social impact. Gopi Gopalakrishnan, World Health Partners (WHP), India WHP works to address the lack of basic health services for neglected rural communities that comprise 75% of the developing world. The WHP model builds on the existing and often informal networks of village health practitioners, linking them and their patients with qualified urban doctors via telemedicine platforms. This has resulted in tens of thousands of quality medical consultations every year in which rural patients save an average of USD $6 per health episode. Njideka U. Harry, Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF), Nigeria Since 2001, YTF has worked in regions of Africa plagued by poverty and pervasive unemployment, especially among youth and women. YTF Academy provides beneficiaries with life skills and resources to join the economic mainstream. Since inception, 40% of YTF Academy graduates have been employed by local companies in YTF s partner network, and are being paid three times the average salary, while 38% have gone on to become self-employed. YTF Academy has impacted the lives of over 1.5 million youth in Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon, South Africa, and Kenya and, most recently, Colombia. Bedriye Hulya, B-fit, Turkey B-fit is working to empower women in Turkey through exercise and entrepreneurship education. In Turkey few gyms or exercise facilities are available exclusively for women and those that do exist are aimed at high income customers. B-fit provides affordable gym memberships to women and uses the gym as a platform for workshops and educational services. B-fit gyms are staffed entirely by women and are run by female franchisees. Today more than 150,000 women have B-fit gym memberships in 200 gyms across the county.

3 Jonathan Hursh, INCLUDED, People s Republic of China As cities around the world continue to grow, so do migrant populations living in slums. INCLUDED works to ensure migrants are integrated into cities by promoting partnerships across sectors, brokering access to better services, and providing opportunities for advancement. INCLUDED began in China and is expanding to 10 strategic cities across Asia, Africa and Latin America. On the macro level, they work on architecting a web of thought and practice globally on the migrant slum issue. On the micro level, they and their affiliate partners build dozens of community centers in migrant slums that provide better access to education, employment, social services and information for the migrants. Mads Kjaer, MYC4, Denmark MYC4 believes business must be for a profit, but profit must be for a purpose, and has applied this mind set to help improve access to capital for African entrepreneurs. MYC4 is, via Internet, providing businesses in Africa with direct access to capital on fair and transparent terms as well as providing investors with access to risk/return-adjusted. MYC4 presents an opportunity to make a difference as well as the potential to make a profit. An average loan on MYC4 is 1,700 crowd funded by 50 online Investors. So far 19,500 investors from 117 countries have lent $24,652,877 to 11,900 small businesses in 7 African countries. Kurt Holle, Rainforest Expeditions, Peru Amazon deforestation is responsible for 18% of the world s carbon emissions and represents an enormous threat to millions of species. Rainforest Expeditions takes a new approach to eco-tourism. It was the first company in Peru to partner with a native community to engage in tourism partnerships. Today Rainforest Expeditions runs two eco-lodges and a research center. Its Posada Amazonas Lodge is owned by the native community of Infierno (200 families, 950 people), and co-managed by RFE. Lodge profits alone have increased each family s income by over 100%. Tristan Lecomte, Pur Projet, France Pur Projet helps companies reduce and offset their environmental and social footprint within their own supply chains and core activities by regenerating the ecosystems their activities depend upon. This unique approach is called Insetting. Insetting is a new lever to shift climate action from niche to mainstream. To date, Pur Projet and its partners have planted more than 3 million trees and conserved hectares of virgin forest.

4 Janet Longmore, Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT), Canada Youth unemployment has become a global crisis. Formal education systems are failing to prepare young graduates with the 21 st century skills needed for the modern workforce. DOT s youth-led model creates confident local role models who train and coach their out-of-school, out-of-work peers and community members to become productive technology users taking charge of their personal development and livelihoods. DOT serves as a bridge in the school-to-work, street-to-work transition, providing young people with motivation and market-relevant skills to find jobs and start businesses. DOT works with youth, women and marginalized communities in the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. Rebecca D. Onie, Health Leads, USA Health Leads envisions a healthcare system that addresses all patients' basic resource needs as a standard part of quality care. Health Leads tackles the link between poverty and poor health by enabling healthcare providers to prescribe food, utilities, and other critical resources, just as they would prescribe medication. To keep organizational costs low, Health Leads has tapped into an innovative labor supply: college students. These students work side by side with patients as advocates. In 2011, 1000 patient advocates helped almost 9,000 patients and their families with accessing the critical resources they needed to be healthy. Kristin Peterson, Inveneo, USA Inveneo is a San Francisco-based non-profit social enterprise that designs and delivers sustainable computing and better access to broadband Internet to those who need it most in the developing world. Inveneo enables organizations working in developing countries to better serve people in need, transforming lives through access to education, healthcare, economic opportunity and relief. Inveneo and its partners have delivered projects in 25+ countries, impacting the lives of over 3 million people in some of the poorest and most challenging regions in the developing world. Anne Githuku-Shongwe, Afroes, South Africa African youth present an interesting paradox to the continent's future: the mobile revolution has created massive potential to inform, connect, and educate youth; on the other hand, these 400 million youth are disempowered, jobless, and considered a threat to the stability of countries or a burden to states. Afroes is utilizing interactive mobile learning strategies to teach youth about entrepreneurship and leadership, and to empower them as citizens to address their countries challenges. To date, Afroes has achieved this through mobile games for social change, including: award winning MORABA, which addresses difficult questions on gender-based violence; and HAKI, a game series built for Kenya by Kenyans to promote national cohesion.

5 Jane Chen and Rahul Panicker, Embrace Innovations, USA Over 20 million premature and low birth weight babies are born globally each year. Four million babies die within the first 28 days of their life, with more than a quarter of these deaths occurring in India alone. Hypothermia is a significant problem faced by many of these babies. Embrace has developed a low cost portable infant warmer to provide thermal regulation to premature and low birth weight babies. The warmer works without a constant supply of electricity, making it suitable for rural areas in developing countries. Embrace has impacted over 3,000 babies in India since its launch and is working with partners to help millions of vulnerable babies around the world. Its vision is to develop a line of disruptive healthcare technologies for developing countries. Tom Szaky, TerraCycle Inc., USA Globally, an estimated 22.7 trillion pieces of consumer waste are discarded a year, threatening the global health of our green spaces and waterways. TerraCycle is changing the way people view waste by mobilising individuals to collect previously unrecyclable waste, and incentivizing major corporations, like Kraft Foods and L Oreal, to sponsor the recycling of new waste streams. Through TerraCycle s system, for every trash item returned, two cents is donated to a school or non-profit of the collector s choice. TerraCycle operates in 22 countries, and so far 32 million consumers have diverted 2.5 billion units of waste from landfills and incineration, while earning over USD 5 million in donations for schools and non-profits. Chuck Slaughter, Living Goods, USA Living Goods seeks to reinvent how the poor access vital goods and services, leading to significant gains in the health and wealth of families living in poverty. Living Goods empowers networks of Avon-like micro-entrepreneurs who go door-to-door teaching families how to improve their health and wealth while selling life-changing products like simple treatments for malaria and diarrhoea, fortified foods, safe delivery kits for pregnant mothers, clean burning cook stoves, and solar lights. By combining the best practices of microfinance, franchising, direct selling and public health, Living Goods is creating a fully sustainable system to improve the health, wealth, and productivity of the world s poor.

6 Salvatore Forello, Addiopizzo, Italy The racket of criminal mafia extortions is called pizzo. Addiopizzo is confronting this issue in Italy by changing the public mind set towards culturally accepted extortion taxes. The organization launches education and public awareness campaigns, galvanizing thousands of consumers to commit to shopping at stores whose owners have filed official complaints against the pizzo or who declare to be pizzo-free. Since 2007, Addiopizzo has participated as civil defenders and claimants against extortionists in eighty-six criminal trials, in which it has assisted 38 people and 12 businesses. Anshu Gupta, Goonj, India Goonj channels excess resources in urban households to impoverished rural and disaster-prone areas. Materials include clothes, furniture, and electronic equipment. Goonj collects and delivers 1000 tons of material every year through an extensive network of 500 volunteers and 250 partners across 21 states of India. Goonj also supports village and slum communities in infrastructure/local development projects. Sugianto Tandio, Tirta Marta, Indonesia Traditional plastic that is left behind takes 500 to 1000 years to degrade, causing serious environmental problems. Tirta Marta believes that by developing affordable degradable plastics, it is possible to address environmental challenges and increase economic opportunities for farmers. Tirta Marta s plastics are fair-trade certified, degradable and made from tapioca. Priced for mass-market adoption, Tirta Marta s OXIUM plastic is now used for shopping bags in over 90% of Indonesia s markets and convenience stores. Andrew Youn, One Acre Fund, USA Rural farmers make up 75% of the global poor. Since 2006, One Acre Fund has developed an innovative, market-based approach that enables any poor farmer to double farm profits in one planting season. In Africa, One Acre Fund provides a unique market bundle brings a functioning value chain directly to rural farmers, and includes: 1) high-quality seed and fertilizer, 2) financing, 3) weekly farm training, and 4) post-harvest and market support. Since 2006, One Acre Fund has used this combination of services to enable farmers to permanently transform their livelihoods from poverty to profit-generation.