Ashoka applies the tools of social entrepreneurship to surface and catalyze social innovation, find and support entrepreneurs who spread new solutions, and showcase successful approaches based on these real-world successes.

In order to help the entire field of water and sanitation defeat both emerging and persistent hurdles to critically needed progress in the world, Ashoka is focusing several of our most powerful programs on this topic:

• We are convening groups of leading social entrepreneurs to combine experiences, identify underlying insights and trends in their innovative solutions, and hatch new actions based on the results.  So far, Ashoka and its partners have brought together four groups totaling 33 Ashoka Fellows in India, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
• We are deploying Changemakers.com, using exciting global public competitions to surface innovative ideas and a network of action-takers and supporters.  The 2008 Changemakers competition on water and sanitation implemented in partnership with the Global Water challenge surfaced 264 new ideas from 54 countries.
• We are compiling and combining the deepest insights into successful solutions from both these sources, and disseminating that information back to the social entrepreneurs and other programs within Ashoka and other entrepreneurial water and sanitation organizations.
• We are working with Ashoka Fellows, partner organizations and investors to seed direction action and showcase some of the most powerful new and combined ideas through demonstration projects in drinking water, community sanitation, successful river conservation, flood and drought management, and holistic water management around the world.

The results so far are substantial and sometimes surprising, integrating with successes in global climate change, public health, childhood retention in schools, technology innovation, and local economic development – all as they pertain to water and sanitation.  
Ashoka is seeking donors and partners to help extend and deepen this work.  For more information contact David Strelneck at .

A few online videos of this work are linked below:

Ashoka Water Innovations in Latin America

Ashoka Fellow David Kuria, Kenya

Ashoka Fellow Trevor Mulaudzi

Ashoka Fellow Joseph Adelegan, Nigeria

David Strelneck