Shows
Inside Social InnovationUncharted Ground: Powering Needs, Empowering LivesPowering Needs, Empowering Lives from Uncharted Ground, a podcast series produced by SSIR and Jonathan Levine. Each episode of Uncharted Ground tells a documentary-style story about one nonprofit or social entrepreneur’s journey to solve a daunting global problem. This episode travels to India where a social enterprise called SELCO has been transforming the lives of the rural poor with affordable solar power for 25 years. Now, SELCO is expanding its impact by helping other entrepreneurs replicate its model around the world. It’s a story full of lessons about how to design products and services that dramatically improve lives and...
2022-01-2441 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRPowering Needs, Empowering LivesSome 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural poor. He built an entire ecosyste...
2022-01-2439 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRHealing From TraumaThe Northern Triangle countries of Latin America are some of the most violent in the world. El Salvador and Honduras have ranked among the highest murder rates for years. It’s not only the gang violence we hear most about, but also domestic abuse and gender-based violence. And the trauma it leaves behind has a devastating effect on entire communities, from the hospital staff who treat victims to police officers patrolling the streets—and especially on children and their ability to learn. Celina de Sola spent a career in humanitarian aid work before returning to her hometown of S...
2021-11-1835 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRFrom Plow to ProsperitySmallholder farming in Africa is a precarious existence. Low economies of scale, commodity price swings, out-of-date agronomic practices, and the effects of climate change conspire to trap farm families in a never-ending cycle of poverty. At the same time, Africa’s booming youth population is entering a saturated workforce without enough jobs to absorb them. In Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, that has led to a surge of gang violence and a wave of insurgencies over the last two decades. Kola and Lola Masha, a Nigerian-born and US-educated couple, set out in 2012 to help mitigate the s...
2021-10-1150 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRA Fair Deal for Coffee GrowersFor decades, smallholder farmers who produce the world’s supply of quality coffee in developing countries have barely earned enough to stay in business. Many have gone under. Millions of those still producing live in poverty and go hungry. Now climate change is threatening their livelihoods as well. The main problem is a supply chain stuffed with so many middlemen, each taking their cut, that only a fraction of the proceeds from pricey specialty-grade beans gets to the grower. That was the picture in Nicaragua until Rob Terenzi, Noushin Ketabi, and Will DeLuca started Vega Coffee in 2013. On...
2021-09-0733 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRThe Business of WaterNothing is more essential to life than clean drinking water. Where it’s in short supply—as in much of Africa and other developing regions—there’s opportunity for promoting good health, improving livelihoods, and making money. Jibu seeks to achieve all three through its franchises that treat, package, and distribute affordable water in the major cities of East Africa. For Jibu, selling water is ultimately a means to the end of spreading economic opportunity for the continent’s aspiring entrepreneurs. A father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading pu...
2021-08-0235 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRA Global Movement for Environmental JusticeFrom coal plants to large-scale agriculture, industrial activities contributing to the environmental crisis tend to concentrate in minority communities with little power, wealth, or legal knowledge to defend themselves. The consequences to health and livelihoods are frequently devastating. To help them protect themselves, the nonprofit Namati trains paralegals to educate and organize ordinary citizens to fight for justice within the legal system and change the laws that threaten their well-being. This episode tells the story of Namati and founder Vivek Maru’s lifelong campaign to give the vulnerable a voice in the legal systems that impact their live...
2021-06-2838 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRThe Healing Force of FamilyThis is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world. Even before the onslaught of COVID-19, public health services in many developing countries were chronically strained by a combination of burgeoning populations, severe shortages of trained clinicians, and growing burdens of disease. Noora Health harnesses an untapped resource—the family members of hospital patients in India—by training them in simple medical skills to help their loved ones recover with fewer complications and readmissions once they return home. Noora’s standard of caregiving is already helping to restor...
2021-06-0138 min
Uncharted Ground With SSIRThe Videos Saving Lives in the Developing WorldThis is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world. Deb Van Dyke, a nurse practitioner for Doctors Without Borders, grew increasingly troubled over 15 years by the low quality of care provided by local health workers around Asia and Africa. So she set up Global Health Media, an international video production house, to make instructional videos customized for the developing world. They have since been used to train more than one million health workers, transforming the way frontline caregivers are learning essential skills and helping them save l...
2021-04-1631 min