The Age Before Impossible: Young Voices, Big Dreams
Speakers
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CEO (Aman Networks), Aman Foundation
Seven years ago, in 2008, Ahsan Jamil joined Arif and Fayeeza Naqvi on an inspirational journey of adventure, exploration and hope, called the Aman Foundation. The Aman Foundation is a not-for-profit business that aims to achieve impact through the relentless pursuit of sustainable, scalable and systemic development in areas of health and education. As its first CEO and one of the founding trustees, Ahsan helped to build this not-for-profit business from the ground up, successfully navigating early stage risks and building the Aman brand to represent quality & trust.
After nearly seven years as CEO of The Aman Foundation, Ahsan Jamil has recently moved into an international role to lead “Aman Networks”. The objective of the initiative is to build an international stakeholder engagement system and partnerships framework, and to enhance the resource mobilization capabilities of Aman Foundation to reach core segments globally to sustainably scale Aman’s two verticals, AmanHealth & AmanTech.
Ahsan has a degree in Mathematics and Economics from Reed College, USA. He started his career at E. F. Hutton on Wall Street, then Chase Manhattan Bank in Karachi, before spending four years in brand management and sales at Unilever, Pakistan. Then in 1991, Ahsan went down the entrepreneurial track and co-founded Ecopack Limited, a PET bottle manufacturing business that became a market leader and the primary supplier to both Pepsi and Coca-Cola in Pakistan. During his 17 years at Ecopack, phenomenal growth in the business was achieved and he successfully helped take the company public.
He chairs the boards of AmanHealth, AmanTech and is on the Advisory board of Acumen Pakistan.
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Founder & CEO, African Leadership Group
Fred is deeply passionate about Africa and believes that the missing ingredient on the continent is good leadership. In line with this, he has co-founded three organizations that aim to catalyze a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial African leaders: African Leadership Academy, African Leadership Network, and African Leadership University. Collectively, these institutions aim to groom 3 million leaders for Africa over a 50-year period. A passionate entrepreneur, Fred also served as Founder and CEO of Terra Education, a US-based education company that today provides leadership training to about 4,000 people annually at 46 sites in 20 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Prior to his work in education, Swaniker co-founded Synexa Life Sciences, a biotechnology company with operations in Cape Town, Berlin, London, and Dublin. Prior to launching his entrepreneurial pursuits, Swaniker worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in South Africa. Swaniker has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was listed by Forbes Magazine among the top ten young ‘power men’ in Africa. Fred has an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top 10% of each graduating class. He holds a BA in Economics with a minor in Mathematical Statistics from Macalester College (magna cum laude). He was born in Ghana but has lived and worked in about 10 different African countries.
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I graduated with a Bachelor of Social Work and minor in Human Services at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and joined Fundación Paraguaya in 2012. As Poverty Stoplight Coordinator, my responsibilities include the management of relationships with 18 organizations abroad replicating this methodology; communications with Hewlett Packard for software development; supervise methodology implementation at 35 private enterprises, governments and churches in Paraguay; lead team in charge of developing tools and solution strategies to the different Poverty Stoplight indicators. This team trains FP loan officers who in the past 3 years have helped 24000 families overcome income poverty, and 3200 families overcome poverty as measured by the 50 indicators in the Poverty Stoplight.
In addition, I am Project Manager for “Inclusive Microfinance Opportunities” implemented with USAID’s support which seeks to make a business case for financial inclusion of people with disabilities in microfinance institutions, and at the same time improve the living conditions of the participating families through the Poverty Stoplight.
Watch Poverty Stoplight video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVL92-0tVlc
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Alumnus, African Leadership Academy
Joseph is an alumnus of African Leadership Academy and a current MasterCard Foundation Scholar, studying Transnational Studies and Global Social Entrepreneurship at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Joseph is passionate about youth development and has begun using his skills to empower young people across Ghana through Youth Impact Workshop. In the past, he conducted research working with the MasterCard Foundation Youth Think Tank on effective youth engagement strategies for NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was also one of four Emerging Leaders to speak at the 2015 edition of Skoll World Forum. He has worked with the West Africa Civil Society Institute, Opportunity International and Simmons Foods. On campus, he serves as co-Organizer of TEDxWestminsterCollege and Founding President of the Westminster Debate Society. Joseph is a Resolution Fellow having won seed funding to implement the Nima Innovation Lab for Girls, a program that will nurture young women to start socially viable businesses in urban poor communities.
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Senior Investment Partner, Mulago Foundation
Kristin grows and supports Mulago’s portfolio of social investments – grants, debt and equity – in high-impact organizations with a scalable model to meet the basic needs of the poor. Her background spans the private, public and nonprofit sectors, including stints in investment banking, the US Peace Corps, the US National Park Service, and organizations focused on early childhood development and immigrant job placement. Kristin has brought these varied experiences to philanthropy since 2008. Prior to Mulago, she was a Principal at the Skoll Foundation, where she worked with social entrepreneurs, and Program Finance Officer at the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, where she focused on environmental conservation. Conservation is a personal and professional passion. In addition to Mulago's Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program focused on scalable solutions to poverty, Mulago recently established the Henry Arnhold Fellows Program to find and fund social entrepreneurs with scalable conservation and climate solutions. In both programs, Mulago equips fellows with the right tools to achieve bigger, better, and faster impact.
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CEO, West African Vocational Education
Misan Rewane is co-founder and CEO of WAVE. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Misan is no stranger to the challenges of education and social mobility. When her parents, unable to ignore the education system's breakdown, were compelled to send her to the U.S. for university, she resolved to help transform the region's education system. After graduating from Stanford University, she worked with The Monitor Group, TechnoServe, and the Centre for Public Policy Alternatives. As an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, she partnered with fellow West Africans who were passionate about tackling youth unemployment and launched WAVE in 2013. WAVE tackles youth unemployment by identifying motivated but underserved West African youth, training them on crucial employability skills, and connecting them to entry-level job opportunities. By turning motivated young talent into reliable human capital for local businesses, WAVE inspires positive change in employer attitudes, creating a fairer and more inclusive labour market.
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Co-Founder and Executive Director, Young 1ove
Noam Angrist is the Executive Director of Young 1ove and is a research-loving social entrepreneur living in Botswana. Young 1ove is an NGO employing 81 young Batswana and reaching over 35,000 youth in Botswana with evidence-based HIV, health and education classes. Their flagship program is a "sugar daddy awareness" class previously shown to reduce pregnancy - a proxy for unprotected sex and HIV transmission - by almost a third. Within 3 years Young 1ove aims to implement evidence-based HIV, health and education programming in Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, Zambia, and South Africa, reaching over 1 million adolescents every year. Noam is a Rainer Fellow with the Mulago Foundation, which supports Young 1ove among other Big Bang Philanthropy donors, MTV, the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Innovation Fund. Noam previously conducted research at the University of Botswana as a Fulbright Scholar, evaluated effective poverty-alleviation programs at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, conducted research for the World Bank and advised on rapid randomized impact evaluations at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Noam holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from MIT, and an MSc. in Evidence Based Social Intervention & Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
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Director (2009-2016), Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
Dr. Pamela Hartigan was Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford from 2009 until her passing in 2016. She was also founding partner of Volans Ventures, an organization focused on building innovative scalable solutions to challenges affecting our future.
Prior to starting Volans, Dr. Hartigan spent eight years as the Founding Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum, where she was also a member of the Managing Board.
Of Ecuadorian origin, Dr. Hartigan first came to the United States at 17 years of age to study at Georgetown University; she went on to complete a PhD in human developmental psychology at the Catholic University of America. Throughout her career, she held varied leadership positions in multilateral organizations and educational institutions, as well as in entrepreneurial ventures. She was responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments, and programs across a variety of institutions and platforms.
Dr. Hartigan was a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate business schools in the USA, Europe, and Asia, and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School and at the University of Technology Sydney. She co-authored a book with John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility (UK), entitled The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets to Change the World, which was published by Harvard Business Press in 2008.
She was a trustee of social investment organizations, publicly listed companies, and social impact focused organizations around the world.
Dr. Pamela Hartigan died on August 12, 2016, at her home in France.
