Who is a Social Entrepreneur?

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Social entrepreneurs are often possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers—a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything.

Over the past two decades, the citizen sector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.

Ashoka's role in this historic transformation of the citizen sector has led us to identify and support leading social entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. We have elected them to the lifelong Ashoka Fellowship, a network of over 2000 social entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries.

Leading Social Entrepreneurs: Selected Ashoka Fellows in Sri Lanka

Nandasiry Wanninayaka
Students in rural Sri Lanka are at a competitive disadvantage in today’s economy for two reasons: they lack the training and English skills typically provided by urban schools, and the low levels of infrastructure throughout rural areas discourage business investment. Recognizing that the educational system in Sri Lanka is failing to keep pace with the requirements of the job market, Wanninayaka has created a parallel system to better prepare rural children to face the competitive world. His model relies on innovative teaching methods that combine English with computer-skills training, and the simultaneous development of community-wide internet connectivity.

Dr. Darin
Completed his doctorial studied in Economic at Yale Darin came back to pursue a prosperous career in the stock exchange. But he ended up creating a stock market that is total variant of the general notion of stock exchange. Darin created a stock exchange market for the poorest, the inner city slum dwellers, which helped them trade their main item of wealth the city land they occupied for many years and exchanged it for apartments in the city. This way the homeless became the proud owners of condominiums in closer to the city where they work while the authorities can go ahead and use the land they occupied for urban development purpose. Darin used trained welfare officers to be marketing personnel and made them acted on behalf of poor people. His model has been now replicated in Varanashi Indian and in Thailand. One of the real estate companies of Philippines has hired Darin to implement his model with the urban slums of manila using their CSR program.

Lalith Seneviratne
Lalith is developing a sustainable model for rural power generation where communities and villages which do not have grid-connected electricity, will be able to set up their own electrification systems based on biomass and reap the social and economic benefits. Lalith is also working with national organizations to establish larger biomass power generation plants that would sell electricity to the national grid. Lalith has facilitated the development of linkages between the villagers and a well-recognized finance organization in Sri Lanka, to finance the first cycle of loans for villagers to contribute to the setting-up of the combined plantation cum power generating plant. Lalith Seneviratne completed his graduate and Masters degrees in Electronics and Electrical Engineering in United Kingdom and Canada. He used his engineering skills in conservation efforts and creativity has been a pattern in his life.

Currently across the world social entrepreneurs are demonstrating new approaches to many social ill and new models to create wealth at the hand of poor, promote social well being on marginalized and restore environment. The citizen sector is leading to reform the free market and political system that are mostly beneficial to powerful and rich. Personal side of story of social entrepreneurs is that they share the desires of people everywhere: to apply their talents in ways that bring security, recognition and meaning and most importantly have some fun. What has changed in the citizen sector now, is that it offers a broad avenue to satisfy those needs: to align with what you care about, what you are good at and what you enjoy doing every day and have a real impact.