In the Bangladesh slums, building leaders not extremists

We had previously reported about FYSE’s Paragon fellow Ejaj Ahmad, a young social entrepreneur who founded the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Centre. Alaka Dhara Halder, a graduate of the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center and now a member of Princeton University’s Class of 2014, recently wrote about her experience in The Washington Post: The young rickshaw-puller had [...]

Change the World for the price of a few coffee drinks

3 amazing young social entrepreneurs and FYSE Paragon fellows from Asia Pacific have been selected to attend the upcoming Unreasonable Institute and you can help them to impact millions of lives! The Unreasonable Institute is a social entrepreneurship incubator created to host summer institutes where a confluence of young, brilliant, social entrepreneurs undergo rigorous and [...]

Asia’s Young Changemakers: Ketan Deshpante

A student finds the entrance test to an engineering college a never-to-be-forgotten struggle. Most others would simply grumble. Not Kedar Deshpande. He turned the problem into an opportunity, producing a primer for fellow sufferers — a sort of “all you want to know about…” booklet containing the low-down on engineering colleges and their entrance tests. [...]

Asia’s Social Changemakers: Babar Ali (India)

Great story about Babar Ali by the BBC: Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying to change that. In the first report in the BBC’s Hunger to Learn series, Damian Grammaticas [...]

Join the Unreasonable Institute 2010!

The Unreasonable Institute will give social entrepreneurs wings! The Institute annually selects and brings together 25 young social entrepreneurs (Unreasonable Fellows) from across the globe for a 10-week summer institute in Boulder, Colorado. During the camp fellows will incubate their ideas with skill training and mentorship to provide their ideas with traction. They will than [...]

Outlook Business and Ashoka promote social entrepreneurship in India

It is not often that business magazines focus on Social Entrepreneurship. So when an magazine publishes an entire issue dedicated to Social Entrepreneurship then it is time to celebrate. Ashoka India has succeeded to bring 50 social entrepreneurs into a special edition of the Indian magazine Outlook Business. The Outlook Business September 5 issue is [...]

Watch out! Yak Around the World Campaign

I have been a great admirer of Marie and Carol from Shokai and the work they have done here in China. Their company Shokai is in my eyes THE good case example of a social business in China and they are not only financially successful with their business, but also create tremendous impact in rural [...]

Mobile phones for HIV education in India

Like many trailblazing solutions, Hilmi Quraishi’s wildly popular mobile phone games that teach players about AIDS found success through not just hard work, but a novel idea and a bit of serendipity. The novel idea was approaching education about this very serious problem through the universal language of entertainment and using a widely-accessible technology to [...]

Barefoot and…Speaking up for Her Rights

In Bangladesh, there are now 11,400 reasons to treat poor rural women fairly. They are the fleet of ‘barefoot lawyers,’ working all over the country to educate citizens, particularly women, about their rights. Sharmin is a typical barefoot lawyer.  A shy woman in her 30’s, Sharmin was married at age 14, despite the fact that [...]

Social Enterpreneurs in Bangladesh: Waste Concern

Bangladesh has a garbage problem. Dhaka, a city of about 10 million has a particularly big garbage problem. Of the 3,500 tons of trash dumped each day, only half is picked up by the city. The rest is left to lie in the open streets of slums, marketplaces, vacant lots and riverbanks, attracting rats, clogging [...]