Social Entrepreneur

Health technology social enterprise Koe Koe Tech is leapfrogging Myanmar’s broken healthcare system into the 21st Century. Myanmar is a product of its complex history. The country has over 100 ethnic groups and long-running internal tensions. Myanmar was a British colony from the 19th century through 1948. After independence, religious and ethnic tensions flared and by 1962, Myanmar fell into military rule...

The desire to make a sustainable difference, an impact, is a megatrend that social researcher Wendy Lipton-Dibner has been tracking for years. Wendy is a best-selling author. Her latest book is Focus On Impact, The 10-Step Map to Reach Millions, Make Millions and Love Your Life Along the Way.

Keep in mind, when Wendy says “impact” she uses a broader definition than one might use when talking about impact investing...

Scott Anderson sees social entrepreneurship through the eyes of a journalist. He has been the Managing Editor of NextBillion since 2010.

In 2004, C. K. Prahalad published his groundbreaking book Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits. At the time, Scott Anderson was a business journalist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had a chance to read the book and to interview C. K. Prahalad. It left an impression...

The founders of Noora Health utilized design thinking to iterate their way to dramatically improved patient outcomes. It started at Stanford University’s dSchool. When Katy Ashe was an engineering student at Stanford University, she was anxious to find ways to apply her skills. She signed up the d.School’s “Design for Extreme Affordability” class. There she met Edith Elliott. Edith had a background in international policy. They were paired with medical students Shahed Alam and Jessie Liu...

Kago Kagichiri is obviously exceptionally bright. He built his first mobile app in 2001 when he was 12 years old. But he was a restless student. He told me, “I had a lot of problems with the school system. I didn’t see any relevance in what we were learning.”

These two worlds, technology and education, would eventually meet in an unexpected way and plunge him deeply into the world of education technology or EdTech.

In 2011, Kago met Toni Maraviglia...

Social entrepreneurship came early to Tom Osborn. When Tom was 17 years old, his mother became ill with a severe lung infection. This is not an uncommon experience for those who cook indoor with firewood and charcoal. 18,000 people in Kenya die annually due to the effects of cook stove smoke...

We all want to have a social impact, whether we want to start a neighborhood garden or provide clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. And yet, for many of us, we hesitate. We might be afraid or feel ill equipped. Or we might feel like we do not have the time. Sometimes it takes a significant emotional event to shake us up and to send us on a journey to social impact. Duncan Ward has just such a story...

If there were ever an industry that is ripe for disruption, it’s what we might call the social change industry – charitable organizations, NGOs, government organizations and other change makers. That’s primarily because of inefficiencies of information across the industry. If only someone would come along to collapse the barriers to collaboration, think how much more social impact we could have...