Gawad Kalinga (GK) ("to give care" in Tagalog) is a Philippine non-governmental organization known officially as the Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation. It describes itself as a "poverty alleviation and nation-building movement".
Since 1976, through the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, Rolex has supported exceptional individuals who have the courage and conviction to take on major challenges; men and women who have a spirit of enterprise, initiating extraordinary projects that make the world a better place. Each winner receives 100,000 Swiss francs.
Nancy M. Barry is the president of Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, which she founded in September 2006. The organization works with corporations, entrepreneurs, and business schools to build business models that engage low-income producers as suppliers, distributors and consumers of products that build income and assets. She was President of Women's World Banking from 1990 to 2006, expanding the organization's network to reach approximately 20 million low-income entrepreneurs and shaping microfinance worldwide. From 1975 to 1990, Barry worked at the World Bank, pioneering small enterprise programs and leading work on industry, trade and finance.
Smokey Mountain was the term coined for a large landfill once located in Tondo, Manila.
Rags to riches refers to any situation in which a person rises from poverty to wealth, and in some cases from absolute obscurity to heights of fame, fortune and celebrity—sometimes instantly. This is a common archetype in literature and popular culture, such as the writings of Horatio Alger, Jr.
Michele Ruiz, is an entrepreneur, award-winning broadcast journalist, author, public speaker and former Los Angeles news anchor for KNBC-TV. She is co-founder and CEO of BiasSync, a SaaS technology company that helps organizations identify and eliminate biases in the workplace. She is also President and CEO of Ruiz Strategies, a communications firm that develops and executes content marketing strategies for businesses, government entities and executives. She is also the founder and former President/CEO of SaberHacer.com, a bilingual educational broadband website for US Hispanics. She maintains a self-titled blog on the site MicheleRuiz.com.
The phrase women in business refers to women who hold positions, particularly leadership in the fields of commerce, business, and entrepreneurship. It advocates for their increased participation in business.
Paolo Benigno "Bam" Aguirre Aquino IV is a Filipino politician and social entrepreneur who served as a Senator of the Philippines from 2013 to 2019. He is a member of the prominent Aquino family in the Philippines.
Friendship is a needs-driven non-governmental organisation that works in the Char islands and riverbanks of northern Bangladesh, the coastal belt in the south, and as of 2017, the Rohingya refugee camps in Ukhia, Cox's Bazar in the southeast. Established by Runa Khan in 2002, Friendship works to empower people through a sustainable, integrated development approach.
Rags2Riches (R2R) is a social enterprise that was established in 2007 and is based in the Philippines. R2R’s contributions to society lie mainly in its endeavours to alleviate poverty in Payatas, Quezon City. Statistics from the National Statistical Coordination Board of the Philippines show that Quezon City has the highest incidence of poverty in the region it lies in and the figures are also much higher than the national average. R2R works with women from these poor communities in Payatas to increase their levels of income and bring them out of poverty.
ABLE is an American women's clothing and accessories retailer. The company was founded as a nonprofit organization in 2010 by Barrett Ward and Rachel Ward to facilitate women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in leaving the commercial sex industry. Then it converted into a for-profit company and is classified as a benefit corporation.
Runa Khan is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and the founder and executive director of Friendship NGO. Friendship is based on Khan's model of "integrated development," meaning it addresses problems in multiple sectors, including health, education, disaster management and economic development in communities where it is involved, rather than specializing in one of these. Khan won the Rolex Awards for Enterprise in 2006 for work through Friendship to preserve the declining craft of traditional boat building in Bangladesh.
Kashf Foundation is a non-profit organization, founded by Roshaneh Zafar in 1996. Kashf is regarded as the first microfinance institution (MFI) of Pakistan that uses village banking methodology in microcredit to alleviate poverty by providing affordable financial and non-financial services to low income households - particularly for women, to build their capacity and enhance their economic role. With headquarters in Lahore, Punjab, Kashf has regional offices in five major cities and over 200 branches across the Pakistan.
Kanchan Amatya is a Nepalese women's rights advocate, climate justice activist and social entrepreneur. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Sustainable Fish Farming Initiative (SFFI), a female-owned social enterprise working to fight hunger and poverty in Nepal by empowering women farmers in Nepalese rural villages through sustainable fish farming practices. She also currently serves as the UN Women's Global Champion for Women's Economic Empowerment and UN Zero Hunger Champion
Social entrepreneurship in South Asia involves business activities that have a social benefit, often for people at the bottom of the pyramid. It is an emerging area of entrepreneurship that is supported by both the public sector and the private sector.
Ayisha Fuseini is a Ghanaian social entrepreneur. Fuseini is the founder and CEO of a company called Asheba Enterprise, registered in 2013 in Ghana, working with over 600 women in rural communities in Tamale; Northern region. She established a processing center that reduces the workload of the women she works with. Her enterprise also provides financial services to support women in the Shea business. Her company produces beauty products such as soap, body creams and other products using high quality shea butter. She is also a supplier of shea butter to The Body Shop chain.
Nkem Okocha is a Nigerian social entrepreneur and activist who founded Mamamoni, a FinTech social enterprise that empowers poor rural and urban slum women with free vocational skills and mobile loans.
Fiza Farhan is a Pakistani social entrepreneur and activist.
Carrie Tan Huimin is a Singaporean politician. A member of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), she has been the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Nee Soon South division of Nee Soon GRC since 2020.
Urban areas in the Philippines such as Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao have large informal settlements. The Philippine Statistics Authority defines a squatter, or alternatively "informal dwellers", as "One who settles on the land of another without title or right or without the owner's consent whether in urban or rural areas". Squatting is criminalized by the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992, also known as the Lina Law. There have been various attempts to regularize squatter settlements, such as the Zonal Improvement Program and the Community Mortgage Program. In 2018, the Philippine Statistics Authority estimated that out of the country's population of about 106 million, 4.5 million were homeless.
