Denis Opudo
Female entrepreneurs outplayed their male counterparts at the 2018 Skoll Awards for Entrepreneurship. Amongst the winners of the awards, five of them were women. Harish Hande, Anushka Ratnayake, Jennifer Pahlka, Barbara Pierce Bush, and Jess Ladd are the winners of 2018 awards. Harish Hande, jokes for being the only male among the six winners. Hande won the award curtsy of SELCO Foundation. The foundation works on providing cheap solar power to the Indians who are poor.
Skoll awards are given to the either non-profit or profit groups. It goes especially to groups that work on making the world a good place than before. The winners have taken home grand worth $1.2 million for a period of more than three years. According to the senior director for social entrepreneurship for Skoll Jude O’Reilly, the presence of many women in 2018 awards is not by a chance. The question is does women came with sensibilities or special skills to the social entrepreneurship scene?
Barbara Pierce Bush won the award curtsy of her Global Health Corps. She co-founded the startup in 2009. The startup selects young professions who are interested in global health. It then sends them to work with government agencies and health organizations for a period of one year. They work specifically in the US and East and Southern Africa. The startup has managed to send almost 900 professionals. Bush admits that she learned that one always has to get prepared. She is now chairing the group’s board. Daniela Terminel is the group’s new CEO. Furthermore, she is the one who facilitated the guidance of men and women at the top of the agenda. Bush says that one is in a position to either lead with either love or fear, but the best is leading with love. She then adds that one’s workers are in a position to be in their better picture.
Anushka Ratnayake admits that it was not a walk in the park to launch MyAgro. The group helps farmers in Africa to save money through mobile banking. They thereafter use the money to buy seeds and better tools. Furthermore, it helps them to develop smart ways of increasing their income. The main strategy she discovered was going out in the field weekly and coming home with new knowledge. For instance, she learned how farmers of cashew used to sell their nuts to middleman instead of selling them directly. So she will advise farmers to avoid the middle man so as to get high profit.
Victoria Arch is the Angaza’s CEO that developed a pay-as-you-go system that allowed the poor to get clean energy devices. She says that it is so challenging when it comes to raising funds. Despite the fact that the startup aims at making profits it still has to raise capital to carry out its social operations. according to her, women are better placed when it comes to network thinking. They source for other solutions rather than concentrating on a single one.
Jennifer Pahlka is the Code for America’s CEO. The startup develops a digital system. The system helps citizens find solutions to problems that might be hard for the government to solve. She says that one feels lonely during the early stages. One needs support and network. This is especially emotional support during the time when things are not working out. Just as the saying ‘Nobody is an island’ she believes that one can not go through it all alone. However, she attributes networking skills to be a men thing. Men are in a position of coming up with a solution out of a complex thing. But they tend to go on their own rather than asking for help which is important.
Jess Ladd worked with Callisto to give options for women on colleges to report sexual harassment and assault. She also worked on providing the institution with data. Ladd admits that many are not courageous enough to step forward and air their concern. Callisto gives women a chance of writing a report to explain the incident as she works on the right step to take. Callisto also deploys its data to tell assailants who have harassed or assaulted many women. Ladd admits that the use of technology alone is not the solution to the problem. She wanted the solution to quickly boom up. However, she came to realize that she had to learn about what was working rather than on working. She had to do this by carrying out interviews with students, collecting their views on the system. Furthermore, she realized that she needed to carry out an in-person training apart from only giving training video. She admits that women come with a different and unique set of experience to the society.
Hande who was the only man in the group openly lauded the women impact. He says that women have got a strong empathy compared to men. Furthermore, he says that it is not all about a solution to a given problem. Men are fond of working on getting solutions to given problems. One has to first find out how the problem came into existence before finding ways of solving it.
