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2007 Skoll World Forum Closing Plenary

Speakers

  • Founder and CEO, Ashoka, Ashoka
    Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organizations and public service. As the founder and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Bill Drayton has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, growing a global association of over 3,900 leading social entrepreneurs who work together to create an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ world. Ashoka Fellows bring big systems-change to the world’s most urgent social challenges. Over half have changed national policy within five years of launch. As a student, he founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University. In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School. He worked at McKinsey & Company for ten years and taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While serving the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, he launched many reforms including emissions trading, a fundamental change in regulation that is now the basis of much global as well as US regulatory law, including in fields beyond the environment.  Bill launched Ashoka in 1980; in 1984, he used the stipend he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is Ashoka’s Chief Executive Officer. He also chairs Ashoka’s Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working! Bill has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. He has been selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2011, Drayton won Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Award and, in 2019, Drayton was elected as member of the American Philosophical Society. Other awards include Honorary Doctorates from Yale, NYU and more.
  • Peter Moores Dean, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies, Saïd Business School
    Colin Mayer is Peter Moores Dean of the Saïd Business School, Professor of Management Studies and Professorial Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Mayer was the first professor at the Saïd Business School, the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals and was instrumental in creating the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)). He has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, MIT and Brussels University (ULB), where he was the first Leo Goldschmidt Visiting Professor of Corporate Governance. He is a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute and an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Mayer is Chairman of Oxera Holdings Ltd, one of the largest independent economics consultancies in the UK.
  • Leader, Labour Party
    Edward Samuel Miliband is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the South Yorkshire constituency of Doncaster North since 2005 and served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Born in London, Miliband graduated from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, becoming first a television journalist and then a Labour Party researcher, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's confidants and Chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers. As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown appointed Miliband as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 28 June 2007. He was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 3 October 2008 to 12 May 2010. On 25 September 2010, he was elected Leader of the Labour Party.
  • Founder and Executive Chairman, Volans Ventures Ltd
    John Elkington is a writer and thinker, a serial-entrepreneur and an ‘advisor from the future’. John is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development and is credited with coining the ‘triple bottom line’. In 2004, BusinessWeek described John as “a dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades”. John serves on some 30 boards and advisory boards, where a key part of his role is to channel the future into the present across a wide range of disciplines. He is writing his 19th book alongside Jochen Zeitz, former CEO of PUMA and now co-chair, with Sir Richard Branson, of The B Team. The book is provisionally titled The Breakthrough Challenge, exploring ways to institutionalize tomorrow’s bottom
  • Senior Counselor, Skoll Foundation
    Larry Brilliant, MD MPH: Chair, Ending Pandemics; CEO, Pandefense; former Chair, National Bio-Surveillance Advisory Subcommittee; former Prof Epidemiology, UMich, Head of Google.org, CEO Skoll Global Threats, smallpox eradication program WHO, CDC, Senior Counselor Skoll Foundation, Salesforce.org founder, Seva Foundation, co-founder The Well and author of Sometimes Brilliant and The Management of Smallpox Eradication. TIME100 and Ted Prize; multiple honorary doctorates, CNN on-air analyst @larrybrilliant. info@larrybrilliant.com
  • Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, San Francisco, KickStart-International
    Martin Fisher is an award winning engineer and social entrepreneur who led the way in showing how social business models can be used to solve global poverty. Martin received his BSc at Cornell University, and his MSc and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. In 1985 he went to Kenya on a Fulbright scholarship and in 1991 co-founded KickStart International (originally called ApproTEC), a non-profit social enterprise with a mission to enable millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa to earn a lot more money and climb out of poverty. KickStart works by designing and promoting low-cost technologies that poor but entrepreneurial individuals purchase and use to establish highly profitable businesses. Starting in 2000 KickStart has concentrated on the development and promotion of small-scale irrigation technologies. And to date over 350,000 smallholder farmers have used KickStart’s very low-cost irrigation pumps to grow and harvest multiple cycles of high value crops year-round, adapt to climate change and turn their subsistence farms into highly profitable enterprises—enabling over 1.3 million women, men and children to take a major step out of poverty. There is very little irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa, and millions more farmers there can use irrigation to gain sustainable income and food security, and feed the continent. Today KickStart partners with hundreds of development players to promote smallholder irrigation technologies in 16 sub-Saharan African countries, innovates new lowest-cost irrigation tools, and advocates to catalyze a movement to Irrigate Africa. Martin and KickStart have won numerous awards and accolades for their pioneering work including being named a; Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year; Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur; Design News Engineer of the Year; Stanford Engineering Hero; and most recently a member of the Millions Lives Club.
  • CEO / President, Ceres
    Mindy Lubber is the CEO and President of the sustainability nonprofit organization Ceres. She has been at the helm since 2003, and under her leadership, the organization and its powerful networks have grown significantly in size and influence. As a well-known global thought leader, Mindy has inspired coalitions of institutional investors, corporate boards, C-suite executives and capital market leaders to factor sustainability risks and opportunities into decision-making. She regularly speaks to high-level world and national political leaders on clean energy and water policies, and has helped to change the political conversation around tackling climate change to one focused on jobs and the economy. Prior to Ceres, Mindy served as a Regional Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under former President Bill Clinton. She also founded Green Century Capital Management and served as the director of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG).
  • Institute Director, Martin Prosperity Institute
    In 2017, Roger was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers. Roger Martin serves as the Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management and the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competitiveness. From 1998 to 2013, he served as Dean. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants. He has published 11 books the most recent of which are Creating Great Choices written with Jennifer Riel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017) Getting Beyond Better written with Sally Osberg (HBRP, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (HBRP, 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 25 Harvard Business Review articles. Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego and Verizon. A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Roger received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.
  • Managing Director, Kashf Foundation
    Ms. Roshaneh Zafar founded the Kashf Foundation, the first specialized microfinance organization in Pakistan, in 1996.Today, one of the fastest growing MFIs in the country, Kashf Foundation was the first microfinance institute in Pakistan to achieve financial self sufficiency and demonstrated the business case for investing in womens economic empowerment.
  • CEO, Community and Individual Development Association, Community and Individual Development Association City Campus
    Dr Taddy Blecher is CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association; the Maharishi Invincibility Institute and the Imvula Empowerment Trust, and National Chairperson of the SA Government team on Entrepreneurship, Education, & Employability. He is a pioneer of the free tertiary education movement in South Africa, helping create six free access institutions of higher learning. Dr Blecher co-founded the Branson School of Entrepreneurship with Sir Richard Branson, and has raised over R1 billion in cash, property and equity to support free access to post-secondary school education, and to modernizing the South African school system. As a result, over 20,000 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment and moved from poverty to the middle-class. These formerly unemployed youth (70% women) now have combined salaries in excess of R1.425 Billion Rand per annum. and expected life-time earnings of R41.85 billion. Over 600,000 young South Africans in schools have been reached with one-week education and life-skills training courses. Dr Blecher was chosen as one of 21 Icons in South Africa, a World Economic Forum "Global Leader of Tomorrow" award recipient, a World Economic Forum "Young Global Leader of the World", a Skoll Social Entrepreneur winning a $1 million prize, and has been awarded with two honorary doctorates. In 2009 he was named by author Tom Peters as one of his top 5 most influential entrepreneurs in the world over the last 30 years. Over 65 published books have profiled Dr Blecher’s work. A qualified actuary and management consultant, Dr Blecher is passionate about the approach of Consciousness-Based Education, a system of education developing the full potential of every student. This has led the Maharishi Invincibility Institute to winning the first prize in a global competition to find the most innovative education initiative in the world.