Stanford’s Program on Social Entrepreneurship welcomes four social entrepreneurs to campus in spring quarter to engage students and the Stanford community with leaders in the social sector. The four are serving as Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS) Fellows at the Haas Center for Public Service through a partnership with Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. In addition to meeting with members of the Stanford community, they are teaching a community-engaged learning course this spring.

The SEERS Fellows lead organizations using entrepreneurial models to advance social justice and pioneer new approaches to public service delivery for marginalized communities. They have all been recognized for their path-breaking contributions to the field with awards and prestigious fellowships. The 2017 cohort join 19 other SEERS alumni who have been part of the program since its launch in 2011. 

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Developing Healthcare Professionals Across the African Continent

Born and raised in rural Uganda, Christopher (Chris) Ategeka is working to ensure that everyone on the African continent has access to timely, quality health care. He is the founder and CEO of Health Access Corps (formerly Rides for Lives), which works to combat the dire shortage of healthcare personnel in Uganda and across the broader African continent. In an effort to curb the “brain drain” of talented healthcare professionals from African communities, Health Access Corps encourages trained healthcare professionals to stay and work in their local communities. In addition, the organization invests in training and placement of new health personnel to increase the talent pool of professionals committed to working in underserved areas of their countries.

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Employing Local Female Journalists to Report Global News

Cristi Hegranes is the founder and executive director of Global Press, which works to create a more just and informed world by employing and training local female journalists to produce ethical, accurate news coverage from the world’s least-covered places. Global Press operates a training program, Global Press Institute (GPI); an award-winning news publication, Global Press Journal; and an innovative syndication division, Global Press News Service. GPI has trained and employed 180 journalists across 26 developing countries, including Haiti, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

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Raj Jayadev is the co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community organizing and advocacy organization based in San Jose, California. For nearly 15 years, De-Bug has been a platform for the least heard of Silicon Valley—youth, immigrants, low-income workers, the incarcerated—to impact the political, cultural, and social landscape of the region. De-Bug's Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project created an approach to combatting mass incarceration called "participatory defense” that provides support to families with loved ones in the criminal justice system to build a legal defense amid public defenders’ overburdened caseloads. De-Bug has incubated participatory defense hubs across the country and is building a national network of community organizations to make systemic change in the courts from the ground up.

Organizing People and Aligning Resources to Create Social Justice

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Carolyn Laub, a Stanford alumna, consults with social justice nonprofits and foundations on strategy, policy, movement building, strategic communications, scaling and replication. She recently co-founded Springboard Partners, an incubator of both high-impact social justice campaigns and start-up companies. Previously, Carolyn founded the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, which organizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth advocating for safety and justice in schools. Over 16 years, the organization trained over 15,000 youth leaders, grew GSA clubs in California from 40 to close to 1,000, trained youth advocates who helped pass more than a dozen statewide laws, replicated her California model in four other states and created a network serving 3,000+ GSA clubs in 39 states. Carolyn’s fellowship to the program is generously supporting by Echoing Green, an organization that supports early-stage social innovation.

Stanford undergraduate and graduate students have the opportunity to work on community-engaged learning projects with the 2017 SEERS fellows through a course, INTNREL/AFRICAST 142, this spring quarter. The course allows students to work alongside these nonprofit leaders to tackle real organizational challenges. From launching grassroots advocacy campaigns to developing new income generation strategies for organizations, students come away with new insight into the field of social change and concrete skills for the social sector. The course is led by Kathleen Kelly Janus, an attorney who has spearheaded many social justice initiatives in the Bay Area and is co-taught by the SEERS Fellows.  

The SEERS Fellows will be on campus through June to teach the community-engaged learning course, participate in events, and engage with student groups. To learn more about the Program on Social Entrepreneurship visit pse.stanford.edu or to connect with the SEERS Fellows, please contact Sarina Beges (sbeges@stanford.edu).

Stanford students belong to the first generation that could witness the end of extreme global poverty — in what would be one of humankind's greatest achievements — the head of the World Bank said during a recent talk on campus.

But their generation, he said, is also likely to experience the first global pandemic since the 1918 influenza that killed more than 50 million people.

Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said innovations in health, education and finance are behind the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the global population.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative on Oct. 29, Kim lauded faculty and students for their multidisciplinary approach in tackling poverty and improving public health. He is an infectious disease physician who oversaw World Health Organization initiatives on HIV/AIDS.

"Seeking transformative solutions to challenges of development and poverty that are necessarily cross-disciplinary is exactly what a great university should be doing," Kim said in his speech at Stanford.

The World Bank announced last month that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day is expected to drop to 9.6 percent of the global population by the end of the year. That is down from 36 percent in 1990.

The bank has pledged to cut that rate to 3 percent by 2030.

"We expect the extreme poverty rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time in human history," he said. "This is the best news in the world today. And this is the first generation in human history that has been able to see that potential outcome." 

Promoting prosperity

One of the co-founders of Partners in Health, Kim was the keynote speaker at the daylong conference, "Shared Prosperity and Health," which drew together Stanford faculty and researchers, plus government and NGO officials from around the world.

Stanford's global development and poverty effort is a university-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, known as Stanford Seed, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The conference was held at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which was a partner in the event.

Kim's talk was optimistic about the newly adopted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with an ambitious agenda to end poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives, empower women and girls and attain quality education for all children by 2030.

While those goals seem lofty, Kim pointed to the accomplishment of bringing down extreme poverty to 10 percent, a figure many had once said was impossible.

Ninety-one percent of children in developing countries now attend primary school, up from 83 percent in 2000, he said. And the number of people on antiretroviral drugs for treatment of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa has increased eightfold in the last decade.

"But we're humbled by the challenges ahead," Kim said. "Rising global temperatures will have devastating impacts on poor countries and poor people – and, as we saw with Ebola, major pandemics are likely to disproportionately affect the poor."

Pandemic threats

Kim said that most virologists and infectious disease experts are certain a pandemic will sweep the world in the next 30 years. He said that would lead to more than 30 million deaths and anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of lost GDP.

He blasted the global community for taking eight months to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, noting that Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia had among the fastest growing economies in Africa before the outbreak killed more than 11,000 people – most of whom were poor.

In an effort to speed up financial aid the next time such an outbreak occurs, the World Bank is developing the Pandemic Emergency Facility, which would disburse funding immediately to national governments and responding agencies.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2010-2015, spoke earlier at the conference about his work leading the U.S. efforts to contain Ebola.

"Three small countries with total population of maybe 30 million people had such weak health systems with so little domestic investment – in one country $6 per capita health investment per year – that when Ebola became a crisis there was no first-line of defense," he said.

By October 2014, the U.S. was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into containment efforts, including the establishment of a 2,500-personnel military deployment to hit Ebola on the ground. Shah said President Obama "stayed extraordinarily true to the science" of containment at the source.

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Stunted children 

Moving beyond containment of epidemics, Kim said the most important investment developing countries could make in their people starts when a woman becomes pregnant. Using a combination of health, nutrition and education will have lifelong benefits for each child, as well as for the country in which each prospers.

The World Bank estimates that 26 percent of all children under age 5 in developing countries are stunted, which means they are malnourished and under-stimulated, risking a loss of cognitive abilities that lasts a lifetime. The number climbs to 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, giving those children limited prospects in life."This is a disgrace, a global scandal and, in my view, akin to a medical emergency," Kim said. "Children who are stunted by age 5 will not have an equal opportunity in life. If your brain won't let you learn and adapt in a fast-changing world, you won't prosper and, neither will society. All of us lose."

From 2001 to 2013, the World Bank invested $3.3 billion in early childhood development programs in poor countries. Kim said innovative policymaking and financial tools allowed the bank to help Peru cut its rate of child stunting in half to 14 percent in just eight years.

"Progress is possible – and it can happen quickly. But we must do even more,"he said.

Kim said the world set a target in 2012 to reduce stunting in children by 40 percent. But that would still leave 100 million children malnourished and undereducated. The bank and world leaders should pledge to end stunting for all children by 2030, he said.

"With partners like the Global Development and Poverty Initiative and the entire Stanford community, I'm full of hope that we can indeed be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty and create a more just and prosperous world for everyone on the planet."

Read more here about another innovation to improve health in the developing world.

It is time for universities to rethink how they deliver social impact education, prioritizing experiential and purpose-based training over start-up competitions. 

This article originally appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on Sept. 4, 2015

As more students look to pursue meaningful careers in the social sector, it is imperative that educational institutions offer experiential and purpose-based training to support their personal and professional growth. Complex local and global challenges demand innovative solutions that are developed collaboratively by those with the experience, relationships, and values to effectively advance social change. There is no textbook for teaching social change, and the closer we can bring students to social problems–both inside and outside of the classroom–the more informed and effective they will be in developing solutions.  

At Stanford University, where I help lead a program on social entrepreneurship, students become part of an entrepreneurial culture from the time they set foot on campus. Whether launching student groups or social enterprises, the desire—and pressure—to create something new permeates much of the fabric of student life on campus. This is reinforced by a surge of competitions and awards that encourage aspiring social changemakers to experiment, fail, and then try again. 

As the social change sector attracts a new wave of university graduates, it is crucial that higher education responds by providing more meaningful experiences for students to learn through direct engagement. By working with community partners, supporting student fellowships, and experimenting with purpose-driven programming, we can better prepare our students for the challenges and complexities of social change work. It is time to put aside the awards and competitions, and focus on training social movement builders who are guided by purpose and values to make more meaningful and lasting contributions to the field.