Propelling Leaders

Born to a family of entrepreneurs, Adam Molyneux-Berry was immersed in an entrepreneurial culture which led him to establish ICE (Innovation, Collaboration and Entrepreneurship) which is the first green, low-cost technology and innovation hub and co-working space in Egypt.  He is currently working on The Being-Well Resilience Lab or CoCoLabs (Consciousness Coalition), which offers transformative programs that foster well – being and self-leadership capacity during this challenging period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ashif takes victims of caste discrimination, like manual scavengers, bonded labour, Dalit women subjected to gender violence, through an internal journey of empowerment to transform victims into leaders. Ashif has built his support system for community leaders around four pillars: a network of lawyers that provide pro-bono support; new laws to protect the rights of the Dalits and Sufi saint groups; education for underprivileged children; and alternative livelihood opportunities to those renouncing inhumane jobs. Through his initiative, Jan Sahas has liberated 31,000 manual scavengers.

Ashraf's organization ComMutiny works on building leadership for social change with young people by creating vibrant ecosystems and youth-centric spaces.  It focuses on transforming young people by engaging them in deep self-exploration and supporting their social action experiments to become changemakers and awakened active citizens (Jagriks) of their communities, their nations, the planet and the larger Universe. This helps nurture social inclusion, holistic development and fosters social hope by promoting feelings of freedom, ownership, love and learning and growth.

Biplab has created an irrigation system to address water shortage and land dryness by reintroducing the technology of Bhungroo (meaning straw in Gujarat). This concept does not warrant famers to do any upfront payments, instead, they agree to a five-year contract where they can repay the service of waterlogging and irrigation with their crop production. This project is largely used and run by women. 132 units of Bhungroo emancipated more than 6100 farmers from yearly migration to cities, as a result, they regained their land, many for the first time after India’s independence.

Dorien is convinced that economic, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual empowerment must go hand-in-hand in order for young people to feel equipped to make a decent living and, therefore, is helping underprivileged youth with marketable skills. Young Africa’s training programs and resources are designed in alignment with current skills gaps and needs in the job market such as motor vehicle mechanics, welding, plumbing, catering, computing, sewing, and music production and entertainment. Students are also offered a course in business management to ensure that they are equipped to pursue self-employment so they can borrow start-up capital and tools to establish their own businesses.

Cántaro Azul democratizes water ownership by empowering communities to collect, purify, monitor, and sell their own potable water. Access to potable water is a constitutional right in Mexico, yet many citizens in rural areas lack access to this resource. Fermín is also partnering with local health and education institutions to ensure that access to low-cost, high-quality potable water in the associate communities, is economically feasible, widespread, and available everywhere at any time.

Jack’s formidable strategic question is how to transform the dysfunctional market for sanitation into a full, dynamic & beneficial one. The key is to stimulate demand for better toilets, there is an actual need for: “first toilets” among people without any access to proper sanitation; better toilet facilities in urban areas worldwide; and for capital to expand existing services. Jack is now shifting his attention and energy to generating mass-production of sanitation products for low-income groups. He reckons that although poor people cannot afford expensive toilets, their numbers are large enough to command well-designed products at low prices: two and a half billion people mean that more than 500 million toilets need to be supplied.

Jessica sees marginalized communities not only as recipients of information but also as active creators of content. As local people have been subject to discrimination and have a firsthand perspective, she believes they are uniquely suited to be innate correspondents. Being a reporter also improves livelihood opportunities. By utilizing the skills of empathy, teamwork, leadership and change-making; Jessica is tapping into the unique potential of marginalized citizens and pushing them to go beyond their own stories to become the voices of their communities. Video Volunteers has involved 249 correspondents and generated more than 6291 videos.

Jose is building a generation of changemaker entrepreneurs by implementing an educational model adapted to the new way society is organized which encourages teamwork and hands-on learning. In this way, students are not taught about entrepreneurship but are given tools and opportunities to set up their own ventures. By promoting teamwork success instead of individual ones it advocates for the share of responsibilities, ideas and skills. José María is also leading the creation of a global network of local MTA centres, or “labs”, in which the teampreneurship concept is replicated and adapted.

Karima's goal is to create opportunities for every school to set its own curriculum and for every teacher to have the possibility to create their own tools and methodologies based on play and creativity. Karima is passionate about resolving and modifying overused and outdated systems to ones that promote innovative thinking. She is convinced that creativity will make future graduates empowered in their workplace and happier in life. They are building transformative play-based learning experiences on ECD /primary school and building ecosystems of actors to support, facilitate and promote this type of learning.

Kinari has introduced a program that combines healthcare, medical training, environmental conservation and education; to improve people’s health as well as the state of the environment. Through her organization, people living in the buffer zone around the Gunung Palung National Park may access affordable high-quality healthcare in return for serving as defenders of the rainforest. For example, Villages with fewer illegal-logging cases receive a 70 per cent discount on health services. Her program has received 9,000 patients in 2018 and has allowed for a 67% decline in infant mortality. Environmental wise, Borneo’s Gunung Palung rainforest contains the equivalent of 14 years of San Francisco’s CO2 emissions thanks to the tree plantation and caring program from Health in Harmony.

To create an environmentally aware and active generation, Kuldeep is designing and promoting hands-on and participatory learning about environmental issues. He takes children through a cycle of “why” (a problem exists), “how” (to create a solution), and “what” (are the expected outcomes and what needs to be done to achieve them). The children learn to co-create among themselves—as well as with adults—on a wide range of solutions, from simple actions such as fixing leaking taps to more ambitious projects, like creating biogas plants for their school. Reap Benefit has contributed to the creation of 337 civic innovations, which some of them have saved 4,60,00,000 litres of water and diverted 6,65,000 tonnes of waste from landfill.

Lauren is trying to transform the current system and rehabilitation program in Costa Ricans’ prisons in order to maximise the reinsertion process and to minimise recidivism. Lauren works upon multiple levels: -with prison staff, from directors to officers and trainers to help them understand their role in the lives of inmates; -directly with inmates close their reinsertion to create and build businesses as well as psychological and personal support; -with the general public to bring awareness about the current penal system failure and reduce stigma surrounding inmates; -advocating change in public policy.

Dr Manu Gupta, Co-Founder of SEEDS, believes that every community has the right to dignity, well-being and control over their own lives. As a child, Manu exhibited a love for fixing problems in the field seeing his father, an engineer. His mother, a geography teacher, nurtured his interest in the natural environment.  

Through his organization, he empowers local communities to be better prepared for natural disasters and recuperate from them. He bridges the needs and concerns of people affected by disasters with national and international governments to create effective policies towards mitigation, relief, recovery and reconstruction.  His approaches are inspired by indigenous traditional knowledge. To date, SEEDS has assisted over 3 million people helping prevent losses, and rebuilding lives and assets. It has rebuilt over 100 schools and assisted in rebuilding 45,000 houses in South Asia.    

Manu is now focused to scale its mission of a community-owned disaster management approach from Asia-Pacific, globally. SEEDS’ 2030 strategy is to ensure the safety, security and wellbeing of the bottom 1% of families - the 15 million men, women and children suffering losses from floods, cyclones and extreme heat reducing losses by 90 % in the most climate-vulnerable 151 districts of India.

Working closely with inmates as a clinical psychologist, Marjan realized how limited their opportunities for change were. To ensure her efforts would work, she involved prison workers, welfare institutions, artists, athletes, journalists, lawyers, politicians and founded Touché.     

Marjan and her organization, Touché, seek to inspire society to deal with aggression in a constructive way and work with people who are vulnerable because of it. Touché (re-)integrates people with aggression-related problems creating opportunities for them to co-create their own and each other’s solutions together.  They create new roles for (ex-)prisoners and shaped a favourable and inclusive perception of (ex-) prisoners at the same time. By transforming aggression into a positive force, the number of violent incidents decreases, and the number of successful re-integration increases.   

Touché is now building a societal platform to translate anger into untapped energy that can be redirected and utilized in a positive manner. The mission is to catalyse daily positive aggressive choices globally, to see as many people as possible in different parts of the world being more positive and hopeful, seizing opportunities, pursuing equality, finding solutions to their problems, and being more empathic towards each other, especially to those who make us angry. By redefining, sharing and distributing positive aggressive management practices, we change the relationship we all have with anger and the way we interact with each other in and around tense situations.

As a founder of Healing Fields Foundation, Mukteshwari Bosco (Mukti) has utilized her profound understanding of rural communities and their need to develop a series of community-driven innovations in health, in India. Healing Fields launched a micro health insurance program at a time when the majority of Indians were not insured, leading to its national and international recognition.   

The lessons learnt, led to the germination of another highly impactful program, the Community Health Entrepreneur Program. The model is grounded in empowering women as health agents of change to create health awareness in rural communities. Based on the feedback from the participants, the program has expanded to bringing health products and services to last-mile communities while creating livelihoods for the health agents.  Today, this preventative health education program reaches over 6 million families in India.   

Mukti’s passion for community empowerment helps her to see every new challenge as an opportunity for new learning and growth while mentoring and inspiring those around her.  Her aspiration is to empower women with digital tools to amplify access and hold health systems accountable in order to achieve the well-being of 300 million marginalised people in India by 2030.

Neelkanth is building inland fisheries in India, run and owned by landless and marginal farmers. Neelkanth focuses on placing shared resources owned by collectives at the centre of the model. He supports the entrepreneurial growth of farmer groups through diverse linkage and capacity building. He connects them to existing government schemes that provide funds, seeds, and fishing nets, to fishery institutes for training on best practices, and to markets for product sale. In this process, Neelkanth empowers farmer groups to realize their economic potential and builds the capacity for them to advocate for further support and regulation from the government in the fisheries sector. His direct interventions have affected the lives of an estimated 11,500 men and women farmers in four states.

By bringing together industry associations, municipal corporations, NGOs, informal sector waste pickers, collectors, citizens and responsible recyclers, Pranshu is creating a value chain of stakeholders that can meaningfully and successfully shift perceptions and the management of e-waste. By integrating existing informal practices into legitimate, systemic and transparent channels, Pranshu is constructing a much-needed framework for governments and multilateral organisations (such as the World Bank) to replicate this model and to take it to other countries. In 2017, Karo Sambhav through its transparent system of recycling has been able to keep 300,000 kg of e-waste out of landfills and into formal recycling channels.

Prasanna believes that in order to build a vibrant ecosystem that supports the development and delivery of early diagnostics, treatment, as well as R&D for Rare Diseases, there needs to be a strong coalition between stakeholders around shared resources and goals. Emphasising that policy infrastructure needs to be built alongside social and physical infrastructure, Prasanna is leveraging the coalition of support groups, associations and stakeholders to create awareness and then advocate for support from Government to formally identify rare diseases as an issue.

Priya is taking at-risk children - school dropouts or potential dropouts in urban slum communities, juveniles in conflict with the law and those engaged in the informal, exploitative sector - through a transformative journey that enables them to articulate their desired career paths, set goals and chart a realistic course of action.  Her work is ensuring that children from this underprepared space who would otherwise not even be able to consider formal employment options get an opportunity to do so. Through her organization, Priya is breaking stereotypes around job opportunities for children from low-income backgrounds, moving them from exploitative workspaces and preparing them for the growing organized sector in India. The foundation has managed to impact the lives of more than 82000 students through CareerReady and CareerAware.

Ramakrishna (Ram) believes that efforts to increase access to credit without first tackling affordability compromises the core purpose that underlies microfinance: bringing people out of poverty. Ram’s vision is to reduce poverty in India by providing microcredit to underserved communities resulted in Rang De. 

Seeing peer-to-peer lending as a means to an end, Ram introduced India’s first technology platform that crowd-sources capital. He uses the integrity of this process to attract larger capital and credible partners who are aligned to controlling interest rates and delivering quality services. Rang De has field partners in thirteen states across India and has lent to over 10,500 borrowers at an average rate of 8.5 per cent p.a for business loans. 

A network of committed impact partners and change-makers offer microcredit. This has a positive impact on the business, education, health, and environment of the communities with which Rang De works.  

In the coming years, Ram’s bold vision is to build an online credit history that can aid the organization’s borrowers in securing the trust of investors for future endeavours. He sees a future where Rang De evolves to a peer-to-peer bank and is formally recognized within the banking system. Ram also intends to design creative ways of engaging with a wider group of investors while penetrating deeper into the poorest sections of society.

Sarah is a conservation scientist working to rebuild forests and protect endangered wildlife in the tropical dry forests and coastal wetlands of Central America. Her firsthand experience as a young researcher in Nicaragua had a profound impact, convincing her that nature protection must come with opportunities for local people and respect for their culture. This led her to launch Paso Pacifico 15 years ago. Over this time, the organization has effectively averted the local extinction of several species while also building an ethos of nature stewardship within local communities. 

 Today, the climate emergency is upending progress in biodiversity conservation while also threatening the security and well-being of humans. This situation keeps Sarah awake at night.  

 Thus, her current ambition is to elevate traditional forestry knowledge and tools of indigenous and peasant farmers through a technological platform. Her hope is finding ways in which technology and platform thinking will give agency and dignity to people through forest restoration while also reducing greenhouse gases and increasing biodiversity

Procurement is how every city buys goods and services that it cannot obtain internally. Sascha founded Citymart with the goal of transforming the way cities procure solutions to deliver better services. He helps cities and businesses unlock opportunities through high-quality information and advice, wherever they are in the procurement process. He has created a concept that promotes cities as tools for new applications of technology and has built a bridge between these innovations and the decision-makers in cities that procure them, creating a network of mavens and accountable officials. Today, more than 100 global cities from Barcelona to New York and London to Rio de Janeiro have used the Citymart.

Sena’s organization transforms young people into environmental champions and supports the creation of the green economy in the Sahel region. At the primary school level, Sena has launched an environmental education program that has so far been lacking in the educational system. He is building environmental education and green entrepreneurship into a curriculum that currently sits alongside traditional primary education but which he hopes will become incorporated into the formal system. Once the youth are educated on key environmental topics, they are put in direct contact with communities where they experience them firsthand and gain practical experience in creating and spreading solutions.

Shailabh recognized that the design of health financing and health care in India excludes the people and voices of those who are supposed to benefit from it.  He also realized that what´s missing is a health financing model that focuses on health needs and health prevention and is transparent in how health insurance product claims are decided.  

In order to solve this, Shailabh created a mutual health microinsurance model called Uplift that is changing the behaviours of low-income urban/rural families to remain healthy. On one hand, the model ensures that communities have greater access to preventive health care services by organizing value-added services like outpatient care, health check-up camps, a 24x7 medical helpline, etc. On the other hand, it enables the voice and agency of communities by empowering them to govern and take key decisions, based on their spending capacities, with regard to the services (such as microinsurance contribution, product and health services design, claim approvals, etc..).  After fifteen years, Uplift has setup 9 local mutuals across urban, rural and tribal geographies with over 450,000 people covered by it.  They have also developed a state-of-the-art tech platform to manage the program seamlessly and give the people at the first-mile control over their data and processes.  

While building a people-led model of health insurance for India, Shailabh’s ambitious dream is to bring the education and experience of health insurance and preventive care  to 100 million school children in India and to create the first-ever comprehensive health status digital database of the school children. He believes that through platform thinking, this digital infrastructure can be developed in a manner where other organizations can participate and provide this model to schoolchildren everywhere in the country.  

Shanti is employing a business-school approach to disabled employee training that emphasizes problem-solving, team building, and other soft skills. She shares these new methodologies with other training organizations and uses them as a tool to professionalize and pool trained candidates for strategic job opportunities that she identifies. Rather than answering individual job advertisements, Shanti uses her high-level contacts to conduct corporation-wide assessments in order to identify strategic areas to which she can introduce disabled employees. She then shares her diagnostic approach and results with other organizations that train the disabled and encourages them to approach companies in a similar manner.

Founder & CEO, of iKure,  Sujay’s entrepreneurship journey is driven by the vision of ‘creating zero mortality in primary healthcare’. It all began, when he witnessed the plight of his father's situation due to wrong treatment in rural Kolkata. Working in IBM and Oracle, and an ardent technology lover, his personal experience was instrumental in finding a wider perspective of technology application in primary healthcare. iKure has not only addressed the dearth of basic primary care for the marginalized communities in India, but it has also created multiple layered impacts across the community enabling access to affordable and accessible health services, technology-enabled  integrated care, empowering community health workers, and implementing behaviour change programs to create holistic and sustainable impact in human lives. 

Today iKure has impacted over 10 M population across 5,400 villages in 7 states in India with a presence in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.  It aims to touch a 50 M population in the next three years.

Susannah created Generations of Leaders Discovered (GOLD) to develop social capital in African youth. By employing a structured three-year curriculum, GOLD trains and educates potential young leaders and role models in schools and communities who educate, guide and mentor their peers. These young leaders urge their peers to adopt a positive way of thinking about their lives and encouraging their peers to overcome the social challenges they face. It is an evidence-based youth peer education model which has reached over 71,000 young people in 123 communities in 4 countries and seen concrete results in social behaviour change, education and job creation.

Swapnil recognizes that improving sanitation for low-income urban communities in India is as much about better infrastructure as it is about user engagement and the creation of positive habits. He employs a range of creative tactics that influence both: the environment and the emotional and rational side of communities. Applying a human-centric design approach, Swapnil works with the community to make changes to existing public toilets (improving ventilation, introducing child-friendly bowls etc.) that instil ownership and create better user experiences.

Thorkil Sonne founded Specialisterne after his young son was diagnosed with autism. The family had to address several difficult questions and the answers would not only prove valuable for Thorkil’s son, but also the millions of people on the autism spectrum across the world. 

When realizing the impact could benefit beyond autism, he founded the not-for-profit Specialisterne Foundation to enable inclusive employment for one million neurodivergent people across the world through social entrepreneurship, corporate sector engagement and a global change in mindset.  Thorkil and his teams have established a proven track record of inclusive employment. 

Thorkil's ambitious vision is to restore agency at scale for neurodivergent citizens by leveraging platform thinking and technology, to educate volunteers and professionals in neurodiversity inclusion to catalyse decent work and economic growth in communities across the world.