Africa

Changemakers is an initiative of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public that focuses on the rapidly growing world of social innovation. It provides solutions and resources needed to help everyone become a changemaker and presents compelling stories that explore the fundamental principles of successful social innovation around the world.

Changemakers is building the world's first global online "open source" community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions. Changemakers begins by providing an overarching intellectual framework for collaborative competitions that bring together individual social change initiatives into a more powerful whole.

To keep the framework dynamic, the online Changemakers's community identifies and selects the best solutions and helps refine them. The result is global action frameworks, drawing on the work of social entrepreneurs, that seed collaborative action and visibility on a global scale—making a big difference, field by field.

Changemakers's Idea Reviewers are regular contributors of commentary and analysis that ensure lively and rich online discussion.

The "open sourcing social solutions™" model aims to challenge the traditional focus of issues like human trafficking and conflict resolution with a broader, more complete set of stakeholders. As such, each one serves as a platform for building a practitioner- and investor-engaged community that sparks new waves of innovation around problems stuck on conventional approaches.

As the diverse group of stakeholders comes together and sees the way their work and concerns overlap and inspire each other, unexpected and important outcomes typically ensue that the Changemakers model makes possible but could never predict. Changemakers Collaborative Competitions have produced new partnerships between India's largest bank and one of India's largest rural women's programs; the connection of thousands of rural farmers to low-cost health care providers; and the scaling of a Thai affordable housing solution by the world's largest cement manufacturer. These are just three examples that represent the strength inherent in a changemaking community. And they signal the way an entire sector can broaden its focus and integrate a powerful set of solutions and stakeholders bent on change.