Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2022: The Social Entrepreneurs Working Towards A More Equal Future

How to improve literacy and numeracy for India’s 75 million underserved, low-income children with less than $1 per year, per child? Namya Mahajan, Vishal Sunil, and Siddhant Sachdeva set out to tackle this challenge.

The trio is one example of the driven social entrepreneurs and activists who made this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Social Impact list.

They cofounded nonprofit Rocket Learning in 2020. Teachers create digital classrooms on Rocket Learning’s customized WhatsApp platform to engage parents as tutors after school and on the weekends. Rocket Learning sends parents videos demonstrating age-appropriate, play-based learning activities and worksheets and has parents send back daily videos and photos of them doing the work with their kids. Since many families only have one smartphone and limited data connection, Rocket Learning uses low bandwidth content and an asynchronous communication system.

Harvard MBA Mahajan, who worked at McKinsey before founding Rocket Learning, explains that this simple, early intervention can change learning behaviors in the long term, leading to better outcomes for the most vulnerable. And, the trio say, it’s working.

They’ve raised over a $1 million in grants and other funding from backers including Draper Richards Kaplan, Central Square Foundation, ACT Grants, Google.org, Hewlett Packard, MIT Solve, Fast Forward, and SPC Agency Fund. So far, they claim to have reached more than 1 million kids in 90,000 classrooms across five states in India.

Women Empowerment

Elsewhere in India, 29-year-old Aditi Arora is focusing on women’s issues in the world’s second most populous country. She is country manager of Girl Up, a movement founded by the UN Foundation in 2010 to support UN agencies that focus on adolescent girls. Girl Up says it has empowered over 10,000 youth change makers across 200 Indian cities by raising awareness and advocating for issues including gender-based violence, period poverty and mental health. The institution also trains young women in skills including STEM and storytelling.

Next door in Sri Lanka, Poornima Meegammana is an educator, animator, filmmaker and the director of youth development at Shilpa Sayura Foundation, where she leads the Nextgen Girls in Technology program. The courses are designed to empower girls and women by developing their digital skills and cover everything from the Internet of Things to computer programming to manga art. The initiative has reached almost 2,500 students and over 500 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, and received the Unesco Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education in 2020.

In Nepal, Aishwarya Rani Singh is helping underprivileged women access menstrual hygiene products. She founded Putali Nepal, a nonprofit focused on menstrual hygiene education and training to empower and facilitate young people to be trainers in their communities. It is funded through sales of its menstrupedia comic and menstrual cups. Since founding, the initiative has inspired more than 1,000 people to use menstrual cups and has directly or indirectly trained more than 14,000 people.

Sexual-and Gender-Based Issues

28-year old Shawana Shah is an advocate for women and transgender rights in Pakistan. She cofounded Da Hawwa Lur, a platform providing political, social and economic support to girls, women and transgender persons affected by sexual- and gender-based violence in the country. It advocates for policy reform, educates communities about women and transgender rights, hosts literacy workshops, offers tele-counseling services, and has distributed relief packages, including female hygiene kits, in Pakistan. Shah has launched several feminist movements and, in 2016, became the first Asian recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award. In 2019, she was selected to join the UN Women’s Beijing+25 Youth Task Force.

22-year-old Shaneel Lal is an LGBTQIA+ rights activist who spearheaded the campaign that led New Zealand to ban the controversial practice of conversion therapy earlier this year. Lal, who experienced the therapy as a child growing up in Fiji, founded the Conversion Therapy Action Group after moving to New Zealand as a teenager. Last year it helped deliver a petition with over 150,000 signatures to parliament, which responded with a bill to make the treatment illegal. Lal, a law student, was included in New York University Center on International Cooperation’s first cohort of Young Justice Leaders in February.

In Japan, and after working at a firm operating a site focused on gender and sexuality called Palette, Aya Goda took over the site, which now has a million page views a month for its manga discussing feminism and LGBTQIA+ issues. She changed the name to Tiewa similar to taiwa which in Japanese means communicating. She added diversity workshops and a dating app called Ambird for gay men, which has about 150,000 users. After graduating from university, Goda worked at several companies, including recruiting site Wantedly and game maker CyberAgent.

Article Credit: Forbes