Young entrepreneurs are inspired to change the world

MANILA, Philippines - Sonal Kapoor was on her way to shoot a film for her advertising agency in one of New Delhi’s slums when she met a mother on her way to a brothel. It wasn’t the woman — pregnant with her seventh child — who was going to work in the brothel, rather it was one of her minor daughters that she was taking there.

In India, Sonal says, many people don’t just see daughters as less deserving of a good life, but also disposable.

Sonal tells this story at the finals of MasterCard’s Project Inspire at INSEAD campus in Singapore last month. “So I asked the mother, what would you do if your child turned out to be a son? The woman said she would raise him. And if it was a daughter? She would strangle her.”

This was the moment when Sonal knew she couldn’t stay in her corporate job, no matter how lucrative a profession it was. She quit her job, and founded Protsahan, an NGO that educates girls through the arts. It is art as therapy, art as savior. Her group has directly impacted 1,000 marginalized children and women, majority of them having been sexually abused or are former sex workers.  Protsahan trains the girls to become artist-entrepreneurs to create handicrafts.

Three years later, Sonal is one of 10 grand finalists making their five-minute pitches to a panel of judges for MasterCard’s $25,000 grant.

For the 2013 contest, MasterCard received entries from 577 submissions from 62 countries — a five-minute video pitch detailing the project’s business plan, scalability and impact on the community. Its online presence on Facebook has also grown to 70,000 “likes” as of end of August.

On that Friday afternoon, the judges decided to give the grand prize to Sonal. But they didn’t stop there. They had such a hard time deciding on the winners and had clearly been inspired by more than one project that they awarded two more with a $10,000 grant each.

The first award went to Cristi Hegranes from the United States for her project’s global reach. A former journalist, Cristi is the founder of Global Press Institute, which has been training and employing women in developing countries to become journalists since 2007.

GPI is crowd sourcing news stories and selling them for syndication and publishing them on its website. These are stories that are better told by locals living in these countries — whether in cities or far-flung areas — rather than foreign correspondents. 

The second, the inspiration award, went to Ugandan Susan Asio and her Ka Tutandike group, which trains 200 disabled girls in bee keeping. The organization runs bee-keeping programs that teach the girls to set up their own bee-keeping businesses and help market the honey in different communities.

Project Inspire also gave the People’s Choice Award, which was voted on by the public online for three weeks, to lawyer Margarita Gutierrez’s Ilaw ng Tahanan (Light of the Home) project by My Shelter Foundation. Margarita was 13 when she first visited the Women’s Correctional in Manila and has been working with them since. Her project is a takeoff from Illac Diaz’s Liter of Light, those soft drink bottles that are used to light up shanty houses or those without access to electricity.

Margarita’s project is the “second generation,” if you will,  of the solar lamp because you can also now use it to charge your cell phone. Margarita is working with 1,500 Correctional inmates and teaches them skills that can help them gain employment after their prison terms.

One more project in the grand finals was involved in the making and distribution of solar lamps — Anya Cherneff from the Netherlands — for the women of Nepal; Sadie Denis of Canada’s Shanti Uganda organization employs HIV-positive women in Uganda to make fashion accessories; Timor Leste’s Jacinta de Sousa Pereira produces films for television that raise awareness on violence against women; Lilian Kilonzo from Tanzania and her group, Pastoral Women’s Council, give the Maasai women goats to take care of and earn from; Afghanistan’s Walayat Shah trains women in computer skills and how to set up a  home business; and India’s Nivedita Pohankar trains women to make and market masala.

Now in its third year, MasterCard’s Project Inspire: 5 Minutes to Change the World is a joint initiative by the Singapore Committee for UN Women (UN Women Singapore) and MasterCard to inspire young change makers —  18 to 35 years old — and help them create better opportunities for women and girls in the Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.  It was first launched in 2011 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Women’s Day and 25th anniversary of MasterCard in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.

Porject Inspire was founded by Georgette Tan, MasterCard communications group head for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Trina Liang-Lin, president of Singapore Committee for UN Women.

Georgette relates that it was during a casual conversation over brunch with Trina in January 2011 that the idea was born. “We were asking oursevleves, how should we celebrate Women’s Day? We didn’t want to do just another conference. We said, if we were going to invest our time and resources, we wanted to do something that could be grown.  We said, if you had five minutes to pitch an idea, if you had $25,000, how would you change the world? We met in January and somehow we managed to launch it in March.”

Was the idea of Project Inspire an easy sell to MasterCard? “MasterCard has always had many platforms that support women. We work with banks and they’ve a lot of products tailored for women. There has always been this appreciation, for lack of a better word, that women control the purse things. That many of them are better educated, that they’re financially independent and have discretionary income. But it’s not just for themselves — they hold the household purse strings — it’s for their children’s education, what car or house to buy. 

“And we thought, how do we make more of them empowered? Because when you do it with one woman, it’s not just one individual, it’s the whole family — the children get educated, the old folks are taken care of. The multiplier effect is very strong. That’s the basis of why we have a strong commitment to women.”

In 2011, the Philippines’ Bam Aquino’s Hapinoy — which works with nanays (mothers) in sari-sari stores, teaching them to do budget and operate the small stores — won the contest and was given the grant. Early this year, because Georgette and her team saw just how the seed money had benefited so many nanays, Hapinoy was given another $25,000. 

“I’m very passionate and inspired about it. I listened to the stories of the nanays, they’re amazing. I think it’s a woman’s trait — that you put everybody ahead of yourself. Part of it is the nurturing, and another part is making sure that everybody is comfortable, that everybody has enough.”

 â€œI never thought it would grow this much,” says Georgette, who’s obviously the heart and soul of this project. “It wasn’t just the grant that was helping the winners, it was also the publicity that went with it. It started opening doors, corporate sponsors and other organizations giving them support.”