UK Director, Ashoka
Rob is Director of Ashoka UK and has worked with them since 2011. Ashoka is the largest network of social entrepreneurs worldwide, with over 3,000 Ashoka Fellows in 70 countries putting their system changing ideas into practice on a global scale. Ashoka launched the field of social entrepreneurship in the 1980's and has activated multi-sector partners across the world who increasingly look to entrepreneurial talent and new ideas to solve social problems. Ashoka Fellows remain the core of our community, and their insights show us how the world is moving and what is needed next.
Ashoka's mission has evolved beyond catalyzing individual entrepreneurs to enabling an "everyone a changemaker" world. This means equipping more people – including young people - with the skillset and a connection to purpose so that they can contribute ideas and effectively solve problems at whatever scale is needed in their family, community, city, workplace, field, industry, country.
Rob is also an award winning social entrepreneur himself. He founded READ International back in 2004. READ is a Tanzanian based, student-volunteer-led organisation which to date has provided over 1.5 million books to schools and created 100 school libraries. Rob is also co-founder of a ed-tech social enterprise in East Africa called NoPC. More recently, Rob co-founded and is a trustee of Generation Change, an organisation engaging young people in the UK with high quality youth social action.
He has co-authored a book with his wife Nikki about social entrepreneurs in Africa called On the Up.
Something Rob is especially interested in at the moment is the power of collaborative entrepreneurship - by working together as one can we create something more than the sum of our parts.
Rob lives just outside London in Kent with his wife Nikki and their very cheeky two year old son Thomas. He is currently training for his first Marathon at the end of April - the London Marathon.
