Paris was a "bomb". Everywhere you turned, you found yourself face to face with a social entrepreneur who had an explosive new idea that had been tried, tested and with demonstrable impact. Consider these:  

•  In Tanzania, Bart Weetjens’ HeroRat are busy sniffing away to save lives otherwise threatened by Tuberculosis (TB).  When I came back and told a medical doctor of the rats, he believed me, of course, because he knows me for years. But his response was still incredulous: “Are you telling me we need to infest our hospitals with rats?” Well, what could I say: the rats are 80% accurate, while humans are only 40% accurate, and, in just seven minutes, the rats do a human’s whole day’s job , and only ask for a banana for payment!
•  I sat down for breakfast next to Shai Reshef, an Ashoka Fellow and social entrepreneur in higher education. When he began telling me about the University of the People, an institution that is devoted to providing universal access to quality, post-secondary education to qualified students, all online, I almost forgot to eat. That’s a bomb.

 

• Gijs Spoor's story is about cotton growing in India. While, all over the world, small scale cotton growing has a reputation of loss-making, Gijs managed to find profit for producer groups through retail “ambassadors” and from payments for ecological and social impact—or “positive externalities.” That’s a bomb.

 

•  How about South Africa’s Basil Kransdorff’s ‘Calories alone don’t fight malnutrition’ campaign? Armed with his Econocom Foods and its production of the innovative e’Pap product, Basil is addressing the critical problem of ‘the hidden hunger’ in Africa. But, since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I had but to eat the four spoons of the smoothie-like product, which, Basil assured me, gave me more than 70% of my day’s nutritional requirement by supplying me with all that I need of the big five: Iron, vitamin A, zinc, selenium, calcium. And that for Shs 600 ($7) per month – cheaper than regular food! Bioefficiency, he calls it. And it sure is a bomb.

  There were 2,600 such stories around agriculture, music, drama, fighting disease, restoring biodiversity…. I was very pleased to observe that our African team stands out prominently among the world’s best: Bart’s HeroRats; Basil’s bioefficiency focused nutrition; Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka’s linkage between Uganda's wildlife management and rural public health programs;  Lillian Keene-Mugerwa’s defence of labor rights in Uganda, where few workers are unionized; Wamuyu Mahinda’s youth entrepreneurship programme under The Youth Banner….. many, many, good works.   I therefore really liked the official identification of empathy as the all encompassing motivation that drives every Ashoka Fellow in their social entrepreneurship, change-making programmes, and the commitment by Bill Drayton, Ashoka’s Founder, to support the inculcation of empathy among the youth, changing the way the education system works, so that empathy becomes as much of a priority as math or language arts. In a  technologically fast-changing 21st century, clearly, empathy will be one of the very few specific skills that will survive a lifetime!   By the way several of us had hiccups around our trips, but I won’t spare time for them, because we all had a bomb of a time in Paris notwithstanding the eh… well … missed flights, lost wallets, robberies, and the cold foods….   --   Haron Wachira is the Group Managing Director of Akili Holdings Ltd.  He was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2009 for his work along diverse agricultural value chains.  He currently splits his time between Nairobi and Kirinyaga, both in Kenya.