Community - The Youth Collective and Pravah | Education | India

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.

Young Africa | Youth Development | Zimbabwe 

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. 

World Toilet Organisation | Sanitation & Hygiene | Singapore

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. 

Mondragon Team Academy | Youth Development | Spain

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.

Health in Harmony | Natural Resource Management & Health | Indonesia

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.

Fundacion Nueva Oportunidad | Social Insertion | Costa Rica 

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. 

Touché | Social Insertion | Belgium 

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.   

Center for Aquatic livelihood Jaljeevika | Rural Development | India 

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.

Organization for Rare Disease India | Genetic & Rare Disease | India 

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.

Rang De | Microfinance | India 

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. 

Citymart | Community participation | USA

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.

Uplift India Association, Uplift Mutual Development and Aid Society | Health Care | India

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.  

iKure Techsoft Pvt. Ltd.| Heath Care | India

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.   

Samagra | Sanitation & Hygiene | India

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.