Davos 2023: 5 Indians were named as top social innovators for this year by Schwab Foundation

The World Economic Forum-backed Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship awarded 16 organisations for their social innovation initiatives from countries like India, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nigeria, USA, France, and UAE. The 25 winners were recognised for their work in fields like education, agriculture, microfinance, environmental projects, and women’s empowerment in the informal economy. 

The five Indians who won the awards are Aniket Doegar, co-founder and CEO of Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions; Kanika Pal, South Asia Sustainability Head at Unilever; and Punjab Education Collective’s designer Khushboo Awasthi, and co-leaders Rucha Pande and Simranpreet Oberoi. 

1.    Aniket Doegar 

Aniket Doegar is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Limited (HESPL). The organisation works on digitising welfare schemes in India to improve accessibility for low-income rural and urban communities. He is also a board trustee at The YP Foundation.  

HESPL has digitised more than 6,000 schemes in various local Indian languages and supported more than 120,000 people in rural and urban areas for the last seven years. 

In the past seven years, HESPL has digitised welfare schemes and provided application support to more than 120,000 people in low-income rural and urban communities. 

2.    Kanika Pal  

Pal is South Asia Sustainability Head at consumer goods group Unilever, and founded the Solutions for Clean and Healthy Environment Foundation to influence behaviour change for a cleaner planet. 

She has a great passion to understand the inter-connectedness between conserving the environment, enhancing livelihoods and improving the health of people to create sustainable communities.  

3.    Khushboo Awasthi, Rucha Pande and Simranpreet Oberoi 

Punjab Education Collective (India) is co-led by Khushboo Awasthi, Chief Operating Officer of ShikshaLokam, Rucha Pande, Chief Operating Officer at Mantra4Change, and Simranpreet Oberoi, co-founder and leader of Sanjhi Sikhiya. 

Punjab Education Collective exists to transform the public education system of the state of Punjab and improve its educational standards against global benchmarks. It does this by identifying challenges faced by stakeholders on the ground and then co-creating solutions to improve the educational experience.  

It is a collective of four organisations in the education space working together to impact 2.3 million students across 19,000 government schools in Punjab. 

Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship 

The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has impacted over 1 billion people in 190 countries from 2019 to 2022 and works with a community of over 450 global social entrepreneurs. These innovators are improving the social and economic quality of life, providing appropriate and increased access to healthcare, education, energy, finance and water.   

The impact of this community includes: 

* 41 million people with improved healthcare 
* 18 million young people with improved access to healthcare 
* 15.3 million people empowered through better access to finance 
* 10 million migrants and refugees supported 
* 6 million empowered women 
* 3.6 million with improved social and economic livelihoods through financial disbursements and capacity building 
* 2.2 million young people with better access to education 

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