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Ashoka Venture and Fellowship

For more than 35 years, Ashoka has built and nurtured the largest network of leading social entrepreneurs in the world. After a rigorous selection process, they are introduced to a life-long fellowship, where every member is committed to championing new patterns of social good. We encourage Ashoka Fellows to take ownership of the network and we partner with them to co-create Ashoka’s vision of an Everyone a Changemaker world.

Why Leading Social Entrepreneurs are Critical Today

In a world defined by change, success comes from everyone leading. Social entrepreneurs define the new roadmaps that allow people to thrive in this new environment, while providing solutions and demonstrating the how-tos.

Ashoka engages the world’s largest and most powerful network of social entrepreneurs by searching for and selecting the world’s leading social entrepreneurs: Ashoka Fellows. Ashoka pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship more than 35 years ago, and today it continues to build the largest global network of leading social entrepreneurs.

Ashoka Fellows champion new ideas that transform society’s systems -- providing benefits for everyone and improving the lives of millions of people. Ashoka Fellows are the ultimate role models in today’s world.

Ashoka identifies patterns that are emerging from our Fellows—types of solutions, strategies, topic areas, etc.—that often point to areas ripe for major change. These learnings from across our Fellowship guide Ashoka’s work and investments in strategic initiatives that empower every person to be a changemaker.

Venture: Selecting our Ashoka Fellows

Ashoka searches the world for leading social entrepreneurs through an intensive, human-centered process, selecting them into our global, trust-based fellowship of peers.

The Ashoka Fellowship

Ashoka Fellows are the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. They champion innovative new ideas that transform society’s systems, providing benefits for everyone and improving the lives of millions of people.

I founded Nafisika to create safer communities through the reduction of reoffence among prison inmates. Over the ten years that she have engaged with the prison system in Kenya. The trust has become an essential partner in the delivery of behaviour change and economic empowerment skills training to...

Vickie Wambura

Founder Nafisika Trust. Ashoka Fellow since 2013

Ashoka is unlike any other organization I’ve worked with. And this is a good thing. Forget about hierarchies and decision-trees. Forget about caveats and we’ve-never-done-that’s. I have never worked with a more committed group of people whose first response is ‘why not!,’ whose job descriptions say...

Eric Dawson

Founder of Peace First. Ashoka Fellow since 2007