Meet These Social Entrepreneurs On Stage at SOCAP22
SOCAP22 offers opportunities to connect and collaborate for change, and our Entrepreneur Program gives innovators from around the world the opportunity to pitch their ideas on stage. The entrepreneurs selected this year — see a full list here — will share their incredible solutions to pressing social, cultural, and environmental programs at SOCAP22, and have other opportunities for learning and connection before the event.
Below we share more about six sustainable agriculture and climate action entrepreneurs making a difference globally — from creating sustainable solutions to local recycling challenges to connecting small-scale farmers with global markets. Register for SOCAP22 to hear more from them and others in the Entrepreneur Program bringing the most innovative solutions around the globe to scale!
WasteBazaar Ltd
Victor Amusa
What is the focus of your venture?
WasteBazaar is a digital waste-to-value application connecting urban residents to the nearest recycling centers and accredited general waste haulers that are willing to serve them on-demand. WasteBazaar creates a network to protect residents and informal collectors while offering competitive value for recycling.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
Informal waste-pickers are often unable to work their way out of poverty due to low wages. With 60% of the African population projected to reside in cities by 2050, the need for sustainable services will grow. Sanitation is a current challenge as only 20% of waste generated across urban municipalities is collected daily and more than 82 million tons of CO2 emissions are released annually in Nigeria. WasteBazaar currently works with over 200 informal waste-pickers in Nigeria who earn decent wages while collecting and recycling over 6 million kg of waste and reducing annual CO2 emissions by 3.6 million tons.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
Strengthen urban sanitation systems by leveraging digital technology.
Dytech Limited
Alan Chanda
What is the focus of your venture?
Dytech Limited is an award-winning Zambian social enterprise operating in rural Africa that markets and sells organic, fair trade, and indigenous products through the brand name Sweet Harvest. We work through a service delivery model that caters to the entire supply chain.
At the forefront of our mission is education and awareness in a culturally contextual environment. Our systems blend traditional conservation practices that honor the heritage of common property and common lands that we have inculcated into our training and support. Having this spirit blended into the social fabric of our narrative is proving to bring success and sustainability at an accelerated level.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
The project offers social and economic impact to thousands of people in rural African communities by engaging them to produce high-value honey for export to the United States, Europe, Asia, and other global markets. We are developing a commercially scalable, viable, and sustainable disruption-oriented business model by using thousands of low-cost and highly productive beehives in an outgrower scheme that is able to produce honey from the untouched ecologically stable virgin forests and carefully selected rural areas of Africa.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
To be of service to climate change and social impact.
Ecolana
Lisseth Cordero
What is the focus of your venture?
We are building on the existing recycling ecosystem in Mexico. How? We connect existing recycling stakeholders: more than 300,000 consumers, 4,000 collection centers, and 20 CPGs. Our app has traceability to know where items have been recycled. It also analyzes the companies and defines which type of recycling campaign best suits their objectives. Since 2017 we have created a community of consumers that see Ecolana as a tool that helps them to recycle more than 30 types of waste. We have a goal to reach more than 1 million Mexicans with our services and expand to Latin America in a few years.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
- 4,500 tons recycled
- 500,000 digital recycling searches
- 70,000 app downloads
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
Provide opportunities for networking, mentorship, and preparing for investment for social entrepreneurs.
SolarFi Ventures, Inc.
Antonio Dixon
What is the focus of your venture?
We are an impact-driven company working to build efficient and sustainable solutions for disaster response and hospitality. As the world continues to adopt solar power as a means of transforming our cities, we aim to be a part of that effort through our clean solar products.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
Our mobile Bliss solar pod can reduce monthly emissions by nearly 5 tons of CO2, not to mention the elimination of fuel storage/transportation infrastructure. Moving forward, we plan to measure our impact also by the number of people supported in disaster recovery situations, through our database/data collection cloud solutions. We hope to reach the scale where we are working with dozens of agencies across the world, providing thousands of pods and supporting millions of people in disaster areas.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
Invest in renewable energy, sustainability, and economic development.
Grow With Masa, Inc.
Trang Ho
What is the focus of your venture?
Masa is an online platform for small-scale farmers to sell produce to the public. Our vision is to strengthen our localized food supply chain on a global scale, and our mission is to create a viable economy for local farmers while rebuilding our ecosystems.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
We have helped local farmers and producers in Oregon and southwest Washington gain $250,000 in sales through our platform. The metrics we plan to track to measure our impact are gross sales for vendors, total food miles saved, and total savings for customers. We plan to reach 20 U.S. cities by 2025.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
We need to strengthen our food supply chain now to prepare for the future.
SiembraCo
Camilo Ramos
What is the focus of your venture?
SiembraCo is a digital agri-tech initiative that serves as a bridge to connect demand and supply from planting until delivery of the harvest. By bringing technology to the field to control and verify the crops remotely, we reduce waste and loss to generate cleaner production. SiembraCo provides stability to farmers and customers through fair prices, traceability, and a lower CO2 logistical footprint.
What impact is your company creating in the world?
SiembraCo measures its impact with the Iris+ platform and through interviews. Its impact report includes stakeholders such as farmers, conveyors, customers, employers, and other suppliers. In the next five years we project to be operating in at least five Latin American countries and producing more than 56,000 tons of food in a sustainable way.
What call to action or advice do you have for others?
AgTech companies are providing the solutions to address food sovereignty and combating climate change. They need your funding and network support to scale and reach the millions of farmers who could benefit from this technology!
