OPINION: From electing and supporting leading social entrepreneurs to building a changemaker region: Ashoka East Africa at 25

Vincent Odhiambo./HANDOUT

Ashoka East Africa was established 25 years ago with a focused ambition to identify and support the region’s most exceptional changemakers in the social entrepreneurship space with impactful, scalable, innovative solutions that address the world’s most pressing challenges.

Our premise was: when you invest in social entrepreneurs with innovative solutions, you multiply the probability of accelerated social transformation.

In East Africa, we have elected more than 100 such entrepreneurs into our global Fellowship of 4000+ leading social entrepreneurs. We have supported Fellows from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania to scale their innovative solutions.

The results include transformation of market dynamics in various fields, including agriculture, increased access to goods and services such as healthcare, transformed education models such as intergenerational learning, strengthened financial inclusion, such as affordable loans and insurance, advanced climate resilience practices, reshaped civic participation, democratized technological literacy, and changed mindsets to embrace inclusivity.

As we reflect on our journey in the region, we are cognizant of the region’s demographic expansion, youth unemployment, growing citizen expectations around accountability and governance, climate vulnerability, food insecurity, urbanization, growing entrepreneurial energy and mindset, persistent structural inequalities, rapid digitization, governments navigating fiscal pressures, etc.

Using learnings gleaned from our studies and experience both at global and regional levels, two insights stand out: individual changemakers are not enough; all-sector-wide, dramatic changemaking evolution to increase the density of changemakers everywhere is the shift we need to respond, outpace and outnumber these challenges with solutions.

This will turn the tide on the adverse consequences from these challenges and create a new value proposition from each area of challenge. We know that this is not a venture solely for programme interventions or episodic reforms. And this is what is informing our shift from primarily advancing the field of social entrepreneurship and supporting social entrepreneurs to laying the much-needed infrastructure for a region where everyone has the capacity, support, and network of networks to lead change.   

First and foremost, we are at the forefront of helping society understand, at the deepest levels, this new reality and the pathways to increase the density of changemakers in the region.

Secondly, we are sharing knowledge, methodologies, and tools that can form the basis for co-creation to support adults to provide allyship to children in their journey as changemakers, the education sector to promote changemaking as much as academic excellence, and employers to recruit and retain changemaker talent. Imagine what would happen if the Governments across East Africa embedded changemaking competencies in education policies and workforce strategy.

Thirdly, through two and a half decades in the region and 45 years globally, we have evidence that true and sustainable transformation is not accidental; it is architected, and we know that changemakers can change systems.

This is why we are now engaging sector changemakers across the board to collaborate in redesigning existing systems and, maybe, build new ones that produce changemakers at scale by ensuring that growing up, learning, and work experience for children and young people produce and support everyone to become a changemaker. The same applies to our markets, governance structures, and civic spaces.

This is our new evolution in East Africa. The next phase of East Africa’s growth and development will depend on how we build systems that enable every citizen, and especially young people, to shape the future, not wait for it.