2015 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship: Awards Ceremony
Speakers
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Alasdair is a social entrepreneur and ocean conservationist working at the interface of marine protection and poverty alleviation. His organization Blue Ventures develops locally led approaches to marine conservation that benefit people and nature, working at the juncture of biodiversity conservation, human rights and sustainable food production. Alasdair is an Ashoka fellow, Skoll Awardee, and TED fellow.
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Ann Cotton is Founder and Board member of CAMFED, an international non-profit organisation tackling poverty and inequality in sub-Saharan Africa by supporting girls to go to school and succeed, and empowering young women to step up as leaders of change.
CAMFED’s goal is to replace the existing cycle of poverty and inequality with a new cycle of empowerment and opportunity. The organisation’s unique approach is to not only support girls and young women through school, but also on to new lives as entrepreneurs and community leaders. To complete the “virtuous cycle”, graduating students become alumnae and many train and mentor new generations of students. More than 5 million children have already benefited from CAMFED’s programmes in a network of 5,745 partner schools across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi. In 2014, Camfed was recognised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for best practice in taking development innovation to scale.
Ann is an Honorary Fellow at Homerton College, and Social Entrepreneur in Residence at the Cambridge University Judge Business School. She is a noted speaker on international platforms, including the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Skoll World Forum, and the U.S.-Africa Summit. Ann has won numerous awards for her work, including an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the University of Cambridge and The Open University; an OBE in honour of her advocacy of girls’ education in Africa; the Skoll and Schwab Awards for Social Entrepreneurship; Woman of the Year in the UK; and UK Social Entrepreneur of the Year; and the WISE Prize for Education.
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Founder, Graça Machel Trust
Graça Machel is a renowned international advocate for women’s and children’s rights and has been a social and political activist over many decades. She is a former freedom fighter and was the first Education Minister of Mozambique. Her contributions to the Africa Progress Panel, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group and the High-Level Panel on Post 2015 Development Agenda, have been widely appreciated. She is a member of The Elders, Girls Not Brides, Board Chair of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health, African Ambassador for A Promised Renewed, President of SOAS, University of London, Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Board Chair of the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes, President of the Foundation for Community Development, founder of the Zizile Institute for Child Development.
As Founder of the newly established Graça Machel Trust, she has focused more recently on advocating for women’s economic and financial empowerment, education for all, an end to child marriage, food security and nutrition, and promoting democracy and good governance.
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A practitioner from the very beginning, Jagdeesh’s 35 year professional engagement has been on interrelated issues of poverty and environmental degradation and on ‘systems thinking’ at the interface of ecology, society and economy.
Jagdeesh has been the Chief Executive of Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) since its inception in 2001 till July 2020. As the ‘Anchor and Curator’ at FES, he has now taken on the responsibilities of influencing policy, advancing knowledge generation and exchange and constituency building for the Promise of Commons initiative that aims to improve the governance and management of 30 million acres of village commons (community forests and pastures) in India.
Jagdeesh has been conferred the ‘Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship’ in 2015. He is also a Rainer Arnhold (Mulago) Conservation Fellow (2017) and Senior Ashoka Fellow (2020)_. His areas of interest include Commons, decentralized governance, biodiversity informatics, systems thinking and history of science and law.
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Founder And Chairman Emeritus, Jeff Skoll Group
Founder and Chairman Emeritus
Jeff Skoll is an entrepreneur devoted to creating a sustainable world of peace and prosperity. Over the last 17 years, he has crafted an innovative portfolio of philanthropic and commercial enterprises, each a distinctive catalyst for changing the trajectory of issues that most affect the survival and thriving of humanity. This portfolio includes the Skoll Foundation, Skoll Global Threats Fund, Participant Media, and Capricorn Investment Group—all coordinated under the Jeff Skoll Group umbrella. The Skoll entrepreneurial approach is unique: driving large-scale, permanent social impact by investing in a range of efforts that integrate powerful stories, data, capital markets, technology, partnerships, and organized learning networks. Operating independently from one another yet deeply connected through a shared vision, Skoll organizations galvanize public will, influence policy, and mobilize resources to accelerate the pace and depth of change. Jeff was the first full-time employee and President of eBay, where he experienced firsthand the power of combining entrepreneurship, technology, and trust in people. His work today embodies those fundamental lessons. All of Jeff’s organizations rely on the premise that people are fundamentally good, and that given the opportunity to do the right thing, they will.
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Ma Jun began his career in 1993 working for the South China Morning Post, where his research on China’s environmental problems spurred him to publish the 1999 book China’s Water Crisis. In 2004 he was selected as a Yale World Fellow. Upon returning to China, Ma Jun founded the non-profit organization the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) in Beijing in 2006.
As Director of IPE, Ma Jun led the development and launch of China’s first environmental public database, the Blue Map, with website and mobile app platforms. The Blue Map collects air, water and soil quality data from across the country, as well as pollution source information that provides a foundation for green credit and green finance systems. The Green Choice supply chain program he and colleagues initiated has motivated more than 3000 suppliers of major global and local brands to openly address their violation problems.
In 2006, he was awarded as China’s “Green Person of the Year” and was named as one of TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People. Ma was also honored with the Magsaysay Award in 2009 and Goldman Prize in 2012 for his environmental protection work in China, as well as the 2015 Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship for his innovative approach to “lifting the veil” on China’s pollution problems.
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Safeena is the Founder and Executive Director of Educate
Girls (EG), an NGO focused on mobilising communities for
girls’ education. Under Safeena’s leadership, since EG’s
inception in 2007, the NGO has enrolled 750,000+ girls in
school and improved learning outcomes for 1.3 million+
children in India.
Safeena’s guidance and leadership has been instrumental in
EG achieving a major global milestone –
the world’s first Development Impact Bond in education. On
its completion, the bond surpassed both its target outcomes
by achieving 160% of its learning target and 116% of its
enrolment target. These results are testimony to the
commitment of EG to deliver quality at scale (the
organisation currently has 1,760 full time employees and
13,000+ community volunteers) and value to every single
child in the program. She has also been instrumental in EG
becoming the first Audacious project in Asia, a first-of-its-kind coalition that surfaces and
funds critical projects with the potential to create global change.
Previously, Safeena has worked extensively with rural and urban underserved communities
in South America, Africa and Asia. She has been conferred with the 2017 NITI Aayog’s
Women Transforming India Award, the 2016 NDTV-L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth Award,
and has in the past received the British Asian Trust’s Special Recognition Award from HRH
Prince Charles for outstanding contribution in education. Moreover, Educate Girls has
received the prestigious 2015 Skoll Award, 2014 WISE Award, the 2014 USAID Millennium
Alliance Award, the 2014 Stars Impact Award and the India Development Marketplace
Award in 2011 from the World Bank.
ABOUT EDUCATE GIRLS: Educate Girls is a non-profit organisation that focuses on mobilising
communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally backward areas. Working in
partnership with the Government, Educate Girls currently operates successfully in over 18,000
villages
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Past President and CEO, Individual
As the first President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, Sally Osberg helped build it into the leading philanthropy in the field of social entrepreneurship. During her tenure, the Foundation supported more than 100 entrepreneurial organizations driving equilibrium change on many of the world’s most pressing problems and developed innovative platforms for connecting civil society, government and private sector leaders with societal problem solvers. Among these platforms are the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, the Skoll Centre at Oxford University’s Said Business School, and the Sundance Institute’s “Stories of Change” initiative.
In 2015, Sally and Roger Martin published Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, which articulates a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship and distills lessons for practitioners, academics and impact investors. Her thought pieces have appeared in leading social impact and business journals and books; in 2015, she and Roger Martin were honored by Thinkers 50 for their intellectual leadership in the field of social enterprise.
Prior to joining Jeff Skoll and the Skoll Foundation, Sally served as the founding Executive Director for Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, a pioneering institution in the field.
Sally currently serves as the Chair of the Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa) USA Foundation, on the Philanthropy Advisory Council of the Royal Bank of Canada, on the Advisory Council of the Elders, and as a board director of the Social Progress Imperative and the Palestine-based Partners for Sustainable Development. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School of Oxford University.
She received her M.A. in English and American Literature from the Claremont Graduate School and her B.A. in English from Scripps College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Born in Boston, Sally grew up on the east coast but has spent most of her adult life in California. She now lives outside Philadelphia, in Wayne, Pa., within walking distance of her two grandchildren.
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, Soweto Gospel Choir
The Soweto Gospel Choir was formed to celebrate the unique and inspirational power of African Gospel music. The 24-strong choir, under the direction of Beverly Bryer, draws on the best talent from the many churches in and around Soweto.
The choir is dedicated to sharing the joy of faith through music with audiences around the world. Formed in 2002, Soweto Gospel Choir has achieved incredible success in a very short time. They have travelled the world, recorded 5 albums, two dvds and have won countless awards in Sth Africa, USA and Australia. They are Ambassadors for the Nelson Mandela Foundation and their patron is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Soweto Gospel Choir has performed with some of the biggest names in music and performed for some of the most influential people in the world.
