The Social Innovation Podcast was recently joined by Annette Werth and Jeffrey Char, co-founders of SOGO Energy, and the CTO and CEO respectively.  SOGO Energy believes that energy ventures in emerging markets have the power to create valuable, scalable businesses.  However, despite solid business models and fast-growing customer acquisition, they struggle to raise the money they need to sustain such growth.  SOGO Energy was birthed to invest in these local ventures and partner with them on management, technology, and funding.

Some of the topics we discussed:

The Social Innovation Podcast was honored to have Matthew Friedman, the CEO of The Mekong Club on the show.  The Mekong Club is a catalyst for change, inspiring and engaging the private sector to lead in the fight against modern slavery.

If you listen to this episode and are not moved, I do not know what WILL move you.

The Social Innovation Podcast had an inspiring conversation with Neha Mehta, the Founder of FemTech Partners.

Neha is a Lawyer and Fintech professional, specializing in Digital Financial Services, financial inclusion, payment systems, anti-money laundering, and terrorist financing (AML/CFT). She has worked with financial regulators across key Asian markets and assisted in developing effective policies to support diversity and inclusion.

Some of the topics we covered were:

The Social Innovation Podcast had the honor of speaking with Peetachai (Neil) Dejkraisak, the CEO of Jasberry.

Neil and Palmmy were MBA students in 2011 when they learned that Thai farmers were among the poorest in the world, earning just $0.40/day, as a result of poor yield, rising costs, and inefficient agricultural systems. This problem affects 17 million farmers in Thailand alone and it is getting worse as farmers’ debts have tripled in the last decade resulting in a multitude of social problems.

Wanting to create a sustainable, scalable, and irreversible solution to such a problem, they founded Siam Organic, a social enterprise that solves the problem of farmer poverty through innovative organic products with global appeal, starting with Jasberry® rice. Beginning with just 25 farmers in the first year, Siam Organic is now working with over 2,500 farmers, helping them out of poverty, one grain at a time.

Some of the topics that Neil and I discussed:

The Social Innovation Podcast spoke to Louis-Alban Batard-Dupre, the founder and Food Waste Fighter at Yindii.  Yindii is a marketplace connecting Bangkok restaurants and cafes’ surplus to consumers at discounted prices. It reduces Thailand's food waste and its carbon footprint, one meal at a time. The team at Yindii believes that food consumption can have a positive impact on the planet if managed properly.

Clearly, Food Waste and concerns about it are not merely a passing trend.

Some of the topics that Louis and I discussed include:

Louis-Alban Batard-Dupre can be reached here ---> [email protected]

The Social Innovation Podcast had the pleasure of speaking with Lin Hwang, a co-Founder and the CEO of DamoGo, a platform that helps reduce food waste by helping retailers and farms sell their unsold food and produce at a discount before it gets thrown away.  Lin is an extremely experienced food-tech entrepreneur dedicated to making a positive impact through reducing food waste.

Lin and I discussed the following topics:

See the full transcript below.

The Social Innovation Podcast had the pleasure of speaking with Yuha Jin, the CEO and co-Founder of Tella.

According to Yuha, "Tella is short for "TellAfreeca"; a team that started out with the social mission of creating knowledge-based jobs in East African countries for university-educated youth. When my co-founder and I visited some East African countries, we experienced a totally different Africa than what the media portrayed (hunger, illiteracy, unskilled, etc).

We saw that hundreds of thousands of university graduates could speak at least 2-3 languages fluently. Yet most of them were jobless (83% of graduates unemployed in Uganda) or were underemployed. I believe creating knowledge-based jobs is not only important for giving people the means of a livelihood, but these individuals can eventually be the backbone of national economic development in their countries through the pragmatic application of the knowledge garnered on the job."

Suffice it to say that we had a fascinating discussion...

The Social Innovation Podcast had an incredible conversation with Chris Fong, a co-Founder, and Chief Innovation and Strategic Growth Officer at FeFiFo.  At FeFiFo, Chris is spearheading co-farming as a new model to disrupt and democratize the US$159b contract farming industry with a mission to make sustainable, profitable, smallholder farming commonplace.

Chris is passionate about affecting change for the better through process and technology innovation. He has strong business acumen and is also familiar with a wide spectrum of technologies both mainstream and emerging. In particular, he is interested in technology-driven innovation that decentralizes and disintermediates existing business models to improve inclusion, reduce costs, and increase efficiency and transparency.

Chris and I talked about:

You have to listen to this episode.  It will change the way you think about farming and the produce that you eat.

I had the pleasure of speaking with R. Scott Salandy-Defour, a co-Founder of Liquidstar.

Liquidstar offers a new category of energy distribution, utilizing Waypoint charge stations to deploy smart batteries for beyond-the-grid electrical power distribution. Liquidstar’s vision is to leapfrog off-grid markets to the ‘wireless’ battery-powered sustainable ecosystems of the future - solving energy access challenges for the powerless 1.1 billion and providing electricity for essential services during grid destroying disasters.

The core Liquidstar Decentralized Autonomous Utility (DAU) platform strings together various innovation layers provided by expert partners to manage the charging and distribution of source-agnostic electricity through batteries delivered by Power Ranger operators.

To understand the significance and importance of having affordable and sustainable energy in emerging and frontier markets, read a recent post from the Liquidstar blog that starts with this:

"Imagine being in lockdown, forced to sit home alone, unable to charge your phone or laptop. No Netflix, no Zoom - but it gets much worse. In cities across Africa, such as Lagos, Nigeria, people are facing starvation, violence, and riots."

The Social Innovation Podcast spoke to Hannah Thinyane, a Principal Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute in Macau. Hannah leads the Migrant Tech Research Project. Since 2016 she has led a multi-disciplinary team, innovating and inventing ICTs to support proactive and consistent screening of workers in situations of labour exploitation and human trafficking.

She has over 15 years of academic and practical experience in the area of mobile computing, ICT for development, and human-computer interaction. During this time, she has undertaken applied computing research, conceptualizing, designing, developing and rolling out systems for underserved areas in Africa and Southeast Asia.  Through this work, she has made strong connections with mobile operators, local and national governments, inter-governmental organizations, industry and civil society organizations.

She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications based on her research, publishing in both academic and policy circles. Hannah’s work has been presented at / showcased by: UN Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking (2019); UN Business and Human Rights Forum (2019); World Justice Forum (2019); and at INTERPOL’s 2018 Global Conference on Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling.  In 2019 she was invited to speak to the Police Advisers to UN Member States (Nov 2019. Australian Mission to the UN, NY) on using technology to support human trafficking victim identification by law enforcement.  She has also served as a panelist at the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery’s webinar on using tech to assess working conditions in supply chains (June 2020); Code 8.7: Using Computational Science and AI to End Modern Slavery (Feb 2019. UN Headquarters, NY); and the Thomson Reuters Anti-Slavery Summit (Aug 2017. Hong Kong).