Blogs

Save the date! Ashoka Changemakers® will host a #SocEntChat for our Asia community on Wednesday, August 3, from 1PM to 3PM IST (Indian Standard Time!). No matter where you are in the world, we hope you’ll join the semi-finalists from the Powering Economic Opportunity competition, as well as entrepreneurs, innovators and enthusiasts from around the world to discuss innovations and challenges related to market-based solutions that create economic opportunity and generate employment for disadvantaged populations.

#SocEntChat participants will have the opportunity to discuss the state of the global economy, as well as the latest market innovations around lasting economic growth in Asia.
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We are thrilled to announce Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition, run by Ashoka Changemakers® with the support of Google. Citizen Media is an ambitious new effort to catalyze full information citizenship around the globe.

A few words on what that means: Full information citizenship is central to Ashoka’s vision of an “Everyone a Changemaker” world. All people must be able to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society. This is as true and as profound for remote Peruvian villagers and displaced persons in Sri Lanka as it is for Web-savvy American teens.  In a rapidly changing world, news and knowledge is the basis of action – the currency that gives one standing; reveals the horizon of what may be possible in a world where everyone is a change maker; and determines how we interact with others.
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If India’s economic growth is going to reach those who need it most, more has to be done to connect the rural unemployed to jobs. India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but rural workers are at risk of being left behind.

“In India, as in many developing countries, most of the growth is happening in urban areas. Rural populations are often unable to access these growth opportunities,” said Warisha Yunus, moderator at Work and Employment Community, Solution Exchange, a knowledge management initiative of the United Nations in India.

The search for employment has driven widespread rural-to-urban migration, but workers from rural areas face multiple barriers once they move.
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In bright contrast to recent doom-and-gloom news about the state of science and math education, Google announced earlier this week the winners of its first-ever science fair. As The New York Times reported, the three winning entries proposed new ideas for solving acute medical challenges, including a new possible treatment protocol for ovarian cancer.

But the Times headline wasn’t about cancer. It was about girls.

Girls, who remain under-represented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, “swept all three age categories in the competition,” according to The New York Times. Advances in science that just a few generations ago might have gone undiscovered are now coming to light because these girls gained access to STEM subjects at the highest levels. 

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In addition to being the first female private space explorer, Anousheh Ansari works to enable social entrepreneurs to bring about radical change globally with organizations such as the X Prize, Ashoka, and the PARSA Community Foundation. Here she talks to Ashoka Changemakers® about how her passion for space exploration drives her work to promote science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

In the fall of 2006, Ansari, a technology entrepreneur, earned a place in history as the first female private space explorer, the first astronaut of Iranian descent, and only the fourth private explorer to visit space. After completing a six-month training course in Russia and cross-training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston (including the same simulator, zero-g, and survival techniques training that astronauts receive), she joined the crew of a Soyuz mission to relieve one Russian and one NASA crew member on the International Space Station and spent eight days there before returning to Earth.

To help drive commercialization of the space industry, Ansari and her family provided title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million cash award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Ansari is a member of the X Prize Foundation’s Vision Circle, as well as its board of trustees. She is a life member in the Association of Space Explorers and on the advisory board of the Teachers in Space project.

Changemakers: Some have called you one of the first “space tourists,” but that’s not quite accurate, is it? What you did was more akin to being a non-professional astronaut.

Ansari: I use the example of people who climb Mount Everest — you would never call them “Everest tourists,” because it’s not a simple, ordinary flight where you go buy a ticket and a guidebook, and then get on a plane that goes out and comes back. With the technology that exists today, it’s a rigorous task.
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