“If you want to get people behind the fight for climate change it has to be easy and simple to contribute.”

South Pole Group is a leading provider of global sustainability solutions and services. The company has delivered climate-proven solutions and policy advisory to a wide range of public, private and civil society organisations for over a decade. Areas of expertise cover key sustainability-related areas of corporate sustainability, investment climate risks, sustainable supply chains, green finance, as well as renewable energy and energy efficiency. A pioneer in emission reduction and renewable energy projects, the South Pole Group’s portfolio is at present the largest available on the market. South Pole’s impact include over 80 million tonnes of CO2 saved, over 500+ projects in renewables, forestry, agriculture, industry, households and public institutions, screening the climate footprint of over $1 trillion of investments and mobilising over $10 billion for clean energy investments in emerging markets as well as creating nearly 70,000 jobs in developing countries.

Renat Heuberger is a pioneer and social entrepreneur in the field of sustainability, climate change and renewable energies, where he has been engaged since 1999. As a founding partner and CEO of the South Pole Group, he coordinated the setup of the company's global sustainability solutions business. Before founding South Pole, Renat co-founded the myclimate foundation, one of the world's first players on the voluntary carbon markets. Renat has been elected "Social Entrepreneur of Switzerland" by the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Schwab Foundation, and he serves as a member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Climate Change. Renat is a board member of Climate-KIC, Europe's largest public-private innovation partnership focused on climate change, a board member of Climate Friendly Pty Ltd, Australia's leading voluntary carbon company, and of Perenia Pty Ltd. He is a member of the advisory board of HUB Zurich, a platform for social entrepreneurship and MyNewEnergy, a company launching the first-ever platform to compare power products in Switzerland.

“I shouldn’t have been there in the capacity that I was.”

KickStart International is an award-winning, nonprofit social enterprise with a mission to lift millions of people out of poverty. They do this  through their “MoneyMaker” human-powered irrigation pumps. These low-cost ($70 and $150) pumps are bought by small-scale farmers who use them to access wells or nearby water sources to irrigate their plots and grow crops year-round. As a result, farmers transform their farms into profitable businesses and this new income empowers families to properly feed and educate their children, afford healthcare and plan for their futures. MoneyMaker pumps are sold in local retail shops in 16 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. To date, more than 215,000 farming families have used MoneyMaker pumps and KickStart estimate that the pumps  have lifted over 1,000,000 people out of poverty.

Jenna is KickStart International's Senior Partnership Officer. She has spent much of her career accelerating community-based organisations during their startup phase, helping to launch the Ford Family Program under the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame and serving as director of groups in Uganda and Liberia. These roles entailed working closely with founding teams and local communities to identify needs and advantages, designing and executing programs, fundraising and communications strategies. Jenna is passionate about replacing traditional charity, with models that empower individuals to be the agents of their own change.

“Violence against women is the most extreme expression of unequal gender power.”

Take Back the Tech! is a collaborative global campaign with a simple call: for everyone - especially women and girls - to take control of technology to end gender-based violence. Initiated in 2006 by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the campaign has been taken up, adapted and owned by individuals, collectives and organisations globally. In 2014, Take Back the Tech! was awarded the inaugural GEM-TECH award from UN Women and the International Telecommunications Union for Efforts to Reduce Threats Online and Building Women's Confidence and Security in the Use of ICTs. In both 2014 and 2008, Take Back the Tech! received an Honorary Mention for Digital Communities from the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica.

Jac sm Kee is a feminist activist and writer. She currently heads up the Women's Rights Programme for APC. Her areas of focus include internet governance and human rights, sexuality, women’s rights, and internet technologies and feminist movement building. Jac co-founded the Take Back the Tech! collaborative global campaign on technology-related violence against women, and KRYSS, an organisation working with young people on sexual rights in Malaysia. She is currently serving as a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for the Internet Governance Forum, as well as board member for CREA and as co-director of the Centre for Independent Journalism in Malaysia.

“We are in the middle of an economic, environmental and social crisis. And most of us don’t do anything to tackle that.”

PUR Projet is a collective organisation specialised in "Insetting via agroforestry". Insetting means offsetting the social and environmental footprint of a company within its own supply chains and sphere of influence. The forestry projects generate multiple benefits for local communities, while regenerating the ecosystems companies depend upon to make their supply chains and business sustainable. PUR Projet is a certified B Corporation with about 40 projects in around 40 countries. Since its inception PUR Projet has planted 7 million trees and has manages over 200 million trees under conservation.

Tristan is a serial social entrepreneur. He founded an NGO in Nepal for rural development in 1994 and in 1998, he founded Alter Eco, a now leading organic and fair trade company on the french market, which also sells to the US and Australian markets. In 2008, Tristan founded PUR Projet and in 2013, Tristan co-founded the International Platform for Insetting, gathering various companies engaged in the promotion, certification and blockchain registration of Insetting programs and projects. He has been appointed as one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in 2010 and as the “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013" by the Schwab Foundation. Tristan is also a board member of the Chirac Foundation for Peace.

“The real problem for countries emerging from conflict is the economic situation for young people.”

Mozaik Foundation was founded in 2002 and aims to contribute to the economic and social stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Mozaik is a leading social enterprise in the region and its mission is to create an army of young and enterprising people until 2023, who will create jobs and who will be role models for the 70% of young people who dream of leaving the country. Mozaik Foundation also support non-formal youth groups and organisations whose actions bring economic and social benefits. By opening two social businesses, EkoMozaik Ltd. and MaŠta Agency, Mozaik Foundation also showcase that you can run a successful business and still be responsible to society.

Zoran Puljic is the founding director of Mozaik Foundation and he emerged from the last decade with an innovative approach to community and economic development. He is the 2010 Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur and Zoran has served as a member and chairperson of numerous domestic and international boards, including the German Marshall Fund (Balkan Trust for Democracy), European Foundation Centre (Grantmakers East Forum), the Resource Alliance and others. He was also a Duke University Fellow in Civil Society, Harvard Business and Harvard Kennedy Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship and BoardSource Fellow in non-profit governance. Zoran holds an MBA and an MA certificate in Development and in addition to his mother tongue, he is fluent in English, German and Spanish.

“Had I not played the piano, things might have been very different.”

Africa Check, founded in 2012, is the continent’s leading independent fact-checking organisation. Its mission is to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in key countries across Africa, as well as to foster a wider practice of fact-checking across the continent. It exists in the belief that people all over the world make decisions based on the best information available, and that misleading or false information makes for poor decisions. Africa Check currently operates offices in South Africa and Senegal and is soon to launch offices in Nigeria and Kenya. Its teams of researchers work from the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa and the EJICOM journalism school in Dakar, Senegal. Besides publishing reports, Africa Check trains and mentors other media in fact-checking and runs the African Fact-Checking Awards.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones is the founder and executive director of Africa Check. He grew up in Liverpool, UK, before studying African history at Cambridge University between 1984-87. Peter then joined the Paris-based AFP news agency in 1990. Over the next two decades, he worked for AFP as a reporter. Peter were in Bosnia and Croatia during the Balkan wars, in Nigeria as bureau chief for four years over the end of military rule, and in Hong Kong, as chief editor for the Asia region running from New Zealand to Afghanistan. In 2010, his first book, “My Nigeria: Five decades of independence” was published. The following year Peter joined the non-profit AFP Foundation. He left AFP in March 2016, becoming a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation, and a visiting researcher at the University of Westminster. When not working, Peter divides his time between playing the piano and suffering alongside his 12-year old son as Liverpool miss out on the Premiership title year after year.

“The official death toll is 10,000, however MSF estimates it to be 30,000-100,000.”

The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) assists Haitians in enforcing human rights to escape poverty and vulnerability. IJDH, along with its local partner, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), litigates cases in Haitian, U.S. and international courts. They train progressive Haitian lawyers, document human rights violations and works with grassroots activists in Haiti, North America and throughout the world. The BAI and IJDH have spearheaded several innovative, high-impact human rights cases, including the Raboteau Massacre case, tried in 2000 and hailed as one of the most important human rights prosecutions in the Americas. More recent IJDH/BAI cases include the prosecution of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, a complaint against the United Nations for introducing cholera to Haiti, and the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project.

As a human rights lawyer and activist, Brian founded the Boston-based IJDH. He lived and worked in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, first with the United Nations and after 1996 with the BAI. Brian is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Middlebury College. He has held a Brandeis International Fellowship in Human Rights, Intervention and International Law and a Wasserstein Public Interest Law Fellow at Harvard Law School. Awards Brian has received for his work include the 2014 Salem Human Rights Prize and an honorary degree from Canisius College. He has been widely published on human rights in Haiti, in legal journals, and prominent newspapers globally. Brian is on the Editorial Board of Health and Human Rights Journal.

“700 million people can’t read a newspaper today in India.”

PlanetRead’s mission is “Literacy for a Billion”. It’s a registered non-profit which innovates, researches, implements, scales and engages policy and corporations around cost-effective and scalable solutions to support literacy. PlanetRead has implemented Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream song-based TV programming in eight major languages, on Doordarshan, India’s state television network, and Zee, one of India’s top private networks. As a result it has delivered regular reading practice to an estimated 200 million weak-reading TV viewers and conducted impact studies on their reading skills. PlanetRead’s goal is to have SLS on all song-based TV content in India in all official languages, and over time to leverage the India scale up to promote SLS in other countries. Bill Clinton has called it “a small change that has a staggering impact on people’s lives”.

Brij has a Ph.D. in Education from Cornell University and a Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Brij is the founder of PlanetRead and BookBox, both dedicated to scalable solutions for literacy and language learning using ICTs. At IIM-A and PlanetRead, Brij and his team have innovated, researched and implemented SLS on television for mass literacy. The SLS innovation is the recipient of the International Literacy Prize from the US Library of Congress and awards from the All Children Reading Grand Challenge by USAID, the Institute for Social Inventions in London, UK, Development Marketplace from the World Bank and the NASSOM Foundation. Brij has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Education between 2012-2016. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a Schwab Social Entrepreneur and was a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University.

New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map) is one of the world’s leading media and human rights groups. It advances human rights and social justice by using video and other media to strengthen legal advocacy in courts, legislatures and communities. At its heart, N-Map’s work addresses the need for greater participation in the legal and political process by those who have been directly impacted by abuse and injustice. Furthermore, communities most affected by violations are often unable to access key decision makers for a variety of financial, practical, or political reasons. N-Map has collaborated with dozens of human rights organisations around the world to merge media and storytelling into their advocacy. In 2014, N-Map was recognised as a technology and human rights leader when it received a “New Digital Age” award from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Adam Stofsky is the founder and executive director of N-Map. He is a graduate of Amherst College (1998) and Harvard Law School (2004). After finishing law school, Adam served as a law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then received a Skadden Fellowship to work as a litigator at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In 2009 Adam won an Echoing Green Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship to found N-Map. Adam is a frequent speaker at convenings on human rights and innovation. He is also the founder and CEO of Briefly, a for profit social enterprise that seeks to make legal information more accessible. Otherwise Adam spends his time with his two year old son and support his wife who raises sheep, cattle and pigs on a farm in the Hudson Valley outside New York City.

Based in Lagos, Nigeria, Mother's Delivery Kit is a social enterprise, established to promote and enhance safe births, instigate behavioural change and economically empower women. Since its founding in 2014, Mother’s Delivery Kit, has sold almost 100,000 kits, trained over 2,000 birth attendants and set up a technology platform to connect hundreds of women to the lifesaving information and quality healthcare personnel at childbirth. Mother’s Delivery Kit supply birthing kits to health centers, hospitals, university teaching hospitals, maternal and child health organisations, Traditional Birth Attendants and a host of other change makers. The kits include an immunisation calendar, and has played a part in the 70% increase in antenatal and immunisation attendance in communities where Mother’s Delivery Kit works.

Adepeju is the founder of Mother’s Delivery Kit and a lawyer by training. She is passionate about social entrepreneurship and provide simple lifesaving solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. Adepeju is a White House Emerging Global Entrepreneur, a PATH International Innovation Champion, a 2014 Mandela Washington Fellow, Fellow of the International Center for Women Canada, Fellow of the Unreasonable Institute, member of Women in Successful Careers (WISCAR), a 2015 Young Innovator of the World at the Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), one of She Leads Africa’s top 10 female entrepreneur for Diaspora Demo day, a 2015 YNaija top 10 most influential Nigerians under 40, a 2015 Cordes Fellow and an acknowledged Global Change Leader by the Coady International Institute in Canada.