The Age of Ambition

The world is slowly evolv­ing. Every age has had a “rev­o­lu­tion” that defined that age. In the 60’s, it was the peace move­ment that came out to protest the war machin­ery of the Cold War. The philip­pines in the 70’s saw a whole gen­er­a­tion of young socially ori­ented indi­vid­u­als who fought with their very lives the power of a dic­ta­tor. The 80’s was a time of tech­no­log­i­cal, musi­cal, and show­biz rev­o­lu­tion. In the Philippines–and as this arti­cle points out—all around the world, the first years of 2000 saw the rev­o­lu­tion of social entrepreneurship.

We have a group of young peo­ple from my own uni­ver­sity (Ate­neo de Manila) form­ing organizations/foundations/corporations like Path­ways to Higher Edu­ca­tion, Hapinoy, Rags to Riches. We do not know how his­tory will look back and look at the effects of these move­ments. But there is a cer­tain great­ness in find­ing rad­i­cal solu­tions to age old prob­lems. Because solu­tions in the past have obvi­ously not worked, we have to look for ways else­where. And maybe social entre­pre­neur­ship is the way to go. What do you think?

This is an arti­cle from the New York Times.

The Age of Ambi­tion
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Pub­lished: Jan­u­ary 27, 2008

The obvi­ous way to change the world might seem to be through politics.

But grow­ing num­bers of young peo­ple are leap­ing into the fray and doing the job them­selves. These are the social entre­pre­neurs, the 21^st-century answer to the stu­dent pro­test­ers of the 1960s, and they are some of the most inter­est­ing peo­ple here at the World Eco­nomic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of every­one else).

Andrew Klaber, a 26-year-old play­ing hooky from Har­vard Busi­ness School to come here (don’t tell his pro­fes­sors!), is an exam­ple of the social entre­pre­neur. He spent the sum­mer after his sopho­more year in col­lege in Thai­land and was aghast to see teenage girls being forced into pros­ti­tu­tion after their par­ents had died of AIDS.

So he started Orphans Against AIDS (www​.orphansagain​staids​.org), which pays school-related expenses for hun­dreds of chil­dren who have been orphaned or oth­er­wise affected by AIDS in poor coun­tries. He and his friends vol­un­teer their time and pay admin­is­tra­tive costs out of their own pock­ets so that every penny goes to the children.

Mr. Klaber was able to expand the non­profit orga­ni­za­tion in Africa through intro­duc­tions made by Jen­nifer Sta­ple, who was a year ahead of him when they were in col­lege. When she was a sopho­more, Ms. Sta­ple founded an orga­ni­za­tion in her dorm room to col­lect old read­ing glasses in the United States and ship them to poor coun­tries. That group, Unite for Sight, has bal­looned, and last year it pro­vided eye care to 200,000 peo­ple (www​.unite​for​sight​.org).

In the ’60s, per­haps the most remark­able Amer­i­cans were the civil rights work­ers and anti­war pro­test­ers who started move­ments that trans­formed the coun­try. In the 1980s, the most fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple were entre­pre­neurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started com­pa­nies and ended up rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the way we use technology.

Today the most remark­able young peo­ple are the social entre­pre­neurs, those who see a prob­lem in soci­ety and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Dray­ton, the chief exec­u­tive of an orga­ni­za­tion called Ashoka that sup­ports social entre­pre­neurs, likes to say that such peo­ple nei­ther hand out fish nor teach peo­ple to fish; their aim is to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the fish­ing indus­try. If that sounds insanely ambi­tious, it is. John Elk­ing­ton and Pamela Har­ti­gan title their new book on social entre­pre­neurs “The Power of Unrea­son­able People.”

Uni­ver­si­ties are now offer­ing classes in social entre­pre­neur­ship, and there are a grow­ing num­ber of role mod­els. Wendy Kopp turned her the­sis at Prince­ton into Teach for Amer­ica and has had far more impact on schools than the aver­age sec­re­tary of education.

One of the social entre­pre­neurs here is Soraya Salti, a 37-year-old Jor­dan­ian woman who is try­ing to trans­form the Arab world by teach­ing entre­pre­neur­ship in schools. Her orga­ni­za­tion, Injaz, is now train­ing 100,000 Arab stu­dents each year to find a mar­ket niche, con­struct a busi­ness plan and then launch and nur­ture a business.

The pro­gram (www​.injaz​.org​.jo) has spread to 12 Arab coun­tries and is aim­ing to teach one mil­lion stu­dents a year. Ms. Salti argues that entre­pre­neurs can stim­u­late the econ­omy, give young peo­ple a pur­pose and revi­tal­ize the Arab world. Girls in par­tic­u­lar have flour­ished in the pro­gram, which has had excel­lent reviews and is get­ting sup­port from the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment. My hunch is that Ms. Salti will con­tribute more to sta­bil­ity and peace in the Mid­dle East than any num­ber of tanks in Iraq, U.N. res­o­lu­tions or sum­mit meetings.

“If you can cap­ture the youth and change the way they think, then you can change the future,” she said.

Another young per­son on a mis­sion is Ariel Zyl­ber­sztejn, a 27-year-old Mex­i­can who founded and runs a com­pany called Cinepop, which projects movies onto inflat­able screens and shows them free in pub­lic parks. Mr. Zyl­ber­sztejn real­ized that 90 per­cent of Mex­i­cans can’t afford to go to movies, so he started his own busi­ness model: He sells spon­sor­ships to com­pa­nies to adver­tise to the thou­sands of view­ers who come to watch the free entertainment.

Mr. Zyl­ber­sztejn works with micro­cre­dit agen­cies and social wel­fare groups to engage the fam­i­lies that come to his movies and help them start busi­nesses or try other strate­gies to over­come poverty. Cinepop is only three years old, but already 250,000 peo­ple a year watch movies on his screens — and his goal is to take the model to Brazil, India, China and other countries.

So as we fol­low the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, let’s not for­get that the win­ner isn’t the only one who will shape the world. Only one per­son can become pres­i­dent of the United States, but there’s no limit to the num­ber of social entre­pre­neurs who can make this planet a bet­ter place.