Blogs

[Editor's note: This post was written by Alison Craiglow Hockenberry, contributing editor at Ashoka Changemakers®, and originally featured on the Huffington Post.]

"Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." So proclaimed President Theodore Roosevelt. Though we half-joke about what drudgery our working lives can be, the guy was right. Trouble is, it's a prize too few people ever win.

Currently there are more than 200 million people in the world who want and need to work but have no job. The number of people who are employed but underpaid, overqualified, or in jobs that don't match their skills or potential is immeasurable, but certainly enormous.

In an era when matchmaking supply and demand in the world of shopping has reached a level of incredible efficiency, why is it so hard for a willing worker with a specific skill set and an eager employer with a precise need to find each other?
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[Editor's note: This post was written by Alison Craiglow Hockenberry, contributing editor at Ashoka Changemakers®, and originally featured on the Huffington Post.]

This is our new Sputnik moment: The United States is behind in math and science. But this time, the threat has crept up on us without the dramatic blaze of a humiliating and ominous satellite. And without the roaring economy of the late '50s that allowed an instant, enormous commitment to increasing funding for science and technology education.

We need new ideas to fix this problem. Fortunately, these are things we do well in the United States: New. And ideas. And fixing. We have done it before -- to put a man on the moon, to lead the biotechnology revolution, and to transform the way the world connects and communicates. But this time, we'll have to do it without the impetus of a Soviet villain, or a declared War on Cancer, or an Internet stock bubble.

The future is about innovation, and if today's students are going to compete in the world, they'll have to know what they're doing in the fields of study known as the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. With big cuts in education happening at the state and local level -- meaning fewer STEM teachers and fewer resources -- solutions will have to come in part from new places.
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Great news! Ashoka Changemakers® has identified three Early Entry Prize winners in the Powering Economic Opportunity: Create a World that Works competition.

The Changemakers® screening team spent many hours poring over a record 164 solutions – entered by the May 11 early entry deadline – before coming to a decision. Entries came in from 36 countries around the world; Africa, Latin America, and Asia are strongly represented, providing more than three-fourths of the submissions so far.

“We are incredibly excited by the record number of innovations that are surfacing from around the world,” said Gaston Wright, Director of Community for Ashoka Changemakers. “From Cuba, to Uganda, to China, the Changemakers open-source model is providing a platform for innovators to collaborate on high-impact solutions that generate economic opportunity for disadvantaged populations.”
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Today, Ashoka's very own Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich, Chief Entrepreneur for Ashoka's Full Economic Citizenship Initiative, will be leading the World Bank seminar Public Goods through Social Enterprises: Creating Hybrid Value Chains. (Livestream after the jump.)

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The world’s population today is evenly split between cities and rural areas. Developed nations – boasting all the luxuries of modern life – are about three-quarters urban, while nearly half of the population in developing countries lives in densely packed, suffocating city settings. Population continues to rise and mass urban migration dictates that by 2030, 5 billion people will be living in cities; 2 million of whom will be living in slums, without access to potable water and sanitation infrastructure.

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