The Next Generation of Social Entrepreneurs

On Sunday March 18^th, while the rest of the world was in bed recovering from St. Patty’s Day partying, 50 students were in a lecture theatre at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, talking about social development.  The Build-a-Change Symposium, an initiative developed by Smart Solutions Inc., challenged students to brainstorm ideas to real-world problems faced in the development sector, and pitch their ideas to a panel of judges.  As one of the judges, it was a joy to see passionate youth from different disciplines take the knowledge they have learned in the classroom and apply it towards challenges faced on the ground.  In many ways, the symposium was a source of immense hope.

My love affair with the development sector began as a wide-eyed youth who had every intention of wanting to ‘save the world’.  There were inequities that existed; I was privileged to be born into a life of opportunity; I felt like I needed to do something about.  It was as simple as that.

During my first few weeks living and working in Coastal Kenya, I was enamoured by the new cultures, the languages, the freedom to explore, the opportunity to make a difference.  I was hopelessly idealistic that if I worked hard enough, that if I spent day and night understanding the problems of Africa, I could find a way to make everything better.  I could make all the inequities disappear and transform these communities into places of opportunity for all those living within.  But once the honeymoon period passed, the challenges of this transformation became abundantly clear.  As a sector, we’re constantly challenged by limited resources – funding seems to be dwindling each year, meaning there are fewer dollars available to serve an ever-growing population.  The structure of project grants, varying from 3-5 years, compromises the long-term sustainability of an initiative.  The involvement of communities throughout the duration of a project cycle – from the needs assessment to implementation to evaluation – is limited.  Silo mentalities persist in spite of the clear need for multi-sector input approaches to community development.  Collaboration amongst stakeholders in a given area is limited equating to inefficiencies in resources and overburdening existing community structures such as Community Health Workers.  Measuring impact in a cost-effective, reliable way seems to be the million dollar question that we have yet to answer.

But in all of these challenges lay glimmers of hope.  And my experience at the Build-a-Change Symposium was a major source of hope.   To see youth who are passionate about social development, who have a restless desire to make a difference.  University students who are less concerned about salaries and benefits, and are instead contemplating careers that have the potential to make a meaningful impact.   Tech-savvy youth who understand the role technology can play in facilitating change.

 

 

 

 

 

This the next generation of young social entrepreneurs that are ready to hit the stage.  They’re innovative, passionate, global-minded and addicted to achievement.   If given the opportunity and guidance, there is no telling the impact this generation could have.

 

The only thing worse than the smell of a dead rat is…

…not knowing where the dead rat is.  I can sadly say this with conviction, for I have been joined by a family of rats over the last week in my Nairobi flat.  Big, black, furry rodents with tails that double their size.  As I worked at the dining room table, I could see them stirring out of the corner of my eye, scurrying between the stove and refrigerator and back again.  They pitter-pattered across the linoleum floor throughout the night and left their waste wheresoever they pleased.  A day after they took stock in my flat, the maintenance crew arrived – good intentions in one hand, kryptonite in the other – and strategically placed poison throughout the house.  Brilliant idea, ingenious really.  Until the rats consumed the poison and died in undisclosed locations around the flat, leaving an increasingly deadly stench.  So back again the maintenance crew came, superbly eager and on a mission to solve the mysterious case of the missing rats.  They looked left, they looked right.  They looked up, they looked down.  They moved every kitchen appliance, but the intruders were nowhere to be found.  It was a Saturday evening and with reassuring faces, the crew recommended using air freshener to dissipate the smell while we wait for them to return next week during regular working hours.  They marched out of the front door leaving us with a floor full of dust from overturned appliances, a swarm of flies and an unbearably wretched stench.

The situation is less than desirable but it certainly sums up my experience with traditional approaches to development.  A far reach I know, but please bear with me.

We approach communities in need – sometimes because we are called upon (as we called the maintenance men), sometimes without a request, and arrive on scene with the best of intentions.  There is no doubt in our minds that we are going to solve this, we are going to help those who need it, we are going ‘to save Africa’.  We design and implement an intervention – lay down our own poisons if you will – and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done as we walk confidently away.  The problem is every action has a consequence, which brings about a host of new challenges requiring its own set of solutions.  Dead rats because of a poison we planted – or in the case of community development, increased gender inequalities because of an irrigation system we installed that favours a traditionally male-dominated sector; or designing a water collection mechanism that no longer requires women to fetch water, thereby devaluing their role in the community without providing an alternative means to be engaged in society.  These are by-products of our initial inputs and yet, most times we fail to take accountability for the domino effect of issues and wipe our hands clean of the mess.

Sometimes we go back – like my well-intentioned maintenance crew – to finish what we had a hand in starting.  When we go back, the complexity of the problem necessitates turning to new tools, or re-defining the uses of the tools we generally use.  And when those don’t work, or we lack the funds to invest in new resources, we turn our attention to other matters with the promise of coming back.  And that’s our problem.  Too few organizations go back.  Instead, we intricately design a report that highlights our successes and justifies our failures and move on to implement the same intervention in another area.  Something Einstein would deem as insanity.

This is what has happened to the state of Africa, according to Dambisa Moyo’s telling book “Dead Aid”.  We resolved to help those in need by providing financial assistance to Africa in the 1950s after seeing the success of the approach in re-building a ravaged European economy post-WWII.  In the 1970s with soaring prices of oil, we sought to help the poor by lending millions of dollars to the most un-creditworthy countries – and then provided poverty-related aid when these African countries found themselves in greater debt trying to pay back past loans.  Aid deceptively is not free.  The interest payments further pushed Africa into a downward spiral of poverty, which again we sought to fix by lending money to defaulting nations to help them repay what they owed through an IMF initiative called structural adjustment. This served to increase African countries’ aid-dependence and throw them into a larger pool of debt.  Our initial intervention created a domino effect of problems – and we repeatedly turned to the same approach to fix these problems.  We are now in a state of having spent $300 billion of development assistance in Africa over the last 40 years with many poverty indicators remaining stagnant (including life expectancy), and some even worse than when we first arrived – with good intentions of course.

And now that many African countries are suffering from high disease burden, low literacy rates and limited infrastructure, we supply free condoms and bed nets – the band-aid air freshener approach – and promise to come back another time when it is more convenient to our schedules, to our interests.  We walk away, leaving behind a mass of problems for an ill-equipped, ill-resourced community to deal with.

To catch the rat, to solve the problems of ultra-poverty, it takes the perfect mix of ingredients and a precise recipe tailored towards the context.  I think development has failed because we have failed to achieve that perfect mix.  Sometimes we over-emphasize the importance of financial assistance and forget the merit of impact investment.  Sometimes we pay more attention to monitoring and evaluation plans rather than spending dedicated time in communities to observe the impact made.  What the perfect community development recipe dictates, I alone cannot answer.  You cannot answer.  Creating a thoughtful, innovative, effective recipe requires an equally important mix of chefs with different expertise; it requires a multi-sectoral input approach where the beneficiaries are just as equally seen and heard in the kitchen as the agency providing the money.  If we can do this, if brilliant minds from the private, NGO, educational, government sectors can collaborate with communities to develop locally-driven, context-based recipes with defined and measurable outcomes – and have the persistence and creativity to tweek the recipe when things don’t work out as planned – then I have hope that sustainable development is possible.  Sustainable development is within reach.  Sustainable development can happen in our lifetime.

Until then, I seek to develop a locally-driven, context-based recipe with defined and measurable outcomes to rid of my current rat friends.  Multi-sectoral and stakeholder input are welcomed and much appreciated.

From Ideas to Impact

For the last 6 months, I have spent countless hours looking at social innovations in primary health care settings in Kenya.  I have come across leading organizations harnessing the capabilities of entrepreneurs in rural communities.  I have read case studies on the next ‘big thing’ in water purification, alternative energy and agriculture, and listened to hours’ worth of Tedtalks on the challenges faced by developing economies.

It is abundantly clear that there is no shortage in this world of brilliant people with brilliant ideas.  Innovation and out-of-the-box thinking are common-speak amongst today’s generation of go-getters.   But what is equally clear is it’s not all about the idea.  Sure, a fancy new gadget can attract donor funding.  Sure, a malnourished child holding a tech-savvy tool makes for a compelling photo on an NGO’s promotional material.  But the stuff that really matters – the stuff behind the idea – is what defines the success of a project.  Most of development work is uncannily unsexy.  But that’s where you get to roll up your sleeves, throw yourself into the nitty gritty and do some real thinking.  And that’s where I think the fun really begins.

But for most, the fun begins much earlier, in a well-polished boardroom table with suited colleagues who develop a product based on superficial notions of what a rural community in East Africa needs.  An eloquently prepared PowerPoint deck showcases expected yields on a quarterly basis for the next 3 years, and suits adjourn the meeting visualizing this as the turning point for the NGO suffering from donor fatigue or as the gold-standard in corporate social responsibility.

But then the innovation begins its implementation phase and things don’t seem to operate according to the colourful line graphs developed in a city thousands of miles away. Supply chains are faulty because of lack of maintenance of the one ambulance operating in the village.  Male-dominated households prevent the product from reaching its target of women and children.  People place more value on their chickens than a flashy device that holds no promise of putting food on the table or paying for school fees.   And that’s when you rely on the unsexy stuff.  That’s when you admit to failure and spend a day in the field with a farmer understanding his major challenges.  That’s when you shadow a nurse at a village dispensary to observe her overtaxed task-list and obstacles of providing good quality care.  It’s not just about the idea.  It’s about the ability to listen to what people really need and understand how that idea fits into their values, their cultures, their lives.  It’s about having the tact to observe inefficiencies and suggest simple, practical, cost-effective solutions.

And once you begin to understand the gap and potential, that’s when you engage with the government to brainstorm how that idea is aligned with their strategic plan to ultimately ensure community ownership and sustainability.  All too often, we judge governments in developing countries as corrupt and revert to creating our own parallel structures.  Granted, parallel health structures for example, are necessary to prove the efficacy of a new innovation, to take a risk in a generally risk-averse area.  But they are only sustainable if at some defined point, they merge into the infrastructure that currently exists.  The infrastructure that we as aid organizations should seek to improve, rather than developing new competing structures.  And that requires talking.  That requires listening.  By observing, by conversing, we begin to shift the focus from a ‘donor agency-implementing agency’ feedback loop to an ‘implementing agency-community’-centred feedback loop.  A structure that puts the beneficiaries back in the driving seat where they belong.

What I’ve learned is that even when you have the idea, the one that’s going to get you on the cover of Times magazine, the potential for change is limited unless you sit back, shut up and listen to what communities really need.  Sustainable development requires engagement with communities beyond the surface-level, it requires the building of mutually-beneficial relationships and asking critical questions about the underlying system in place.  Because at the end of the day, an innovation is just a nicely packaged idea, unless it goes beyond the glamorous surface of cover photos and success stories and tackles the messy, muddled matters at the core of the issue.

My New Year’s Resolution

As I grapple this year with setting New Year’s resolutions, the crux of confusion lies not in what I want to do, but rather in who I want to be.  Perhaps fittingly after living in East Africa for the last year, the antidote to my befuddlement lies hidden amongst the vast plains and treetops of the Masai Mara.

In 2012…

I want the focus and drive of a cheetah, as it crouches its way through the high grasses towards a herd of wildebeest .  I envy the cheetah’s ability to know what it wants and go after it with swiftness, with skill, with determination.  When the cheetah sets its target on a prey, there is absolutely nothing that can derail it.  Every cell in his body is consumed by the hunt; it is all he sees, it is all he lives for.  It is this relentless hunt, this incessant urge to achieve, to be great that I crave with every fibre of my being.

In a world flooded with clutter and noise, it is those who have the ability to listen that hold an ace up their sleeves.  I seek the giraffe’s ability to listen, for though she was not granted with the gift of sound, she was blessed with the incredible ability to perceive.  It is through listening that you begin to understand, and understanding is at the core of making a meaningful difference.  Though I envy the ability to listen, I fear leaving this world without making a sound, without leaving a legacy.  When I was wrapped in my sleeping bag camping in the Mara, all I could hear in the distance was the laughing scowls of hyenas.  Their voices echo when no one else can be heard – and in my field of work, this is a skill that is much needed.  I seek to be the voice of those who are not given the power to speak, to take a stand when no else does.  I strive to leave this Earth having made a sound; to forget about the need to be liked and the need to fit in, to embody the authenticity of a zebra , whose stripes are unlike anyone that has existed or will ever exist.  To be me. 

I strive to exude the confidence of a lion as he struts his prowess through the Mara.  His presence commands attention, it commands respect simply by being who he is, who he was born to be.  But rather than that confidence be mistaken for ego, I seek the grace and simplicity of a gazelle.  Though she is small, she emanates beauty and elegance with every step that she takes.  She is radiant. 

Working in rural Kenyan communities, I have learned that it really does not take much to be happy.    Life is not all about Porches and designer suits – it’s about a sense of community.  I seek the acceptance of the wildebeest who migrate from the Serengetti to the Mara every year joining herds of 1.5 million others.  Different localities, different families – none of that matters, because at the end of the day, they are all one. 

At this particular point in my life, I crave the freedom of a male impala, who is accountable to no one but himself and like a leopard, is completely satisfied living a solitary life doing what he pleases, when he pleases it.  Eventually, eons and eons down the road, I seek to embody the maternal instinct of any mother found in the Masai Mara.  Whether it is the elephant who carries her baby for 22 months and feeds for up to two years after birth or the Thomson gazelle who separates from her pack for several years to raise her baby – teaching it how to defend itself, teaching it how to feed – before re-joining the rest of the family.  It is this selflessness, this ability to love someone more than life itself that I hope to acquire wholeheartedly.  I wish to age gracefully like a crocodile who is one of the longest living creatures in the Mara, enjoying the beauty of life for seventy to a hundred years before becoming one with the Earth again.

The Mara is a fruit salad of emotions.  Of focus and drive; of confidence, authenticity, freedom; of listening; of grace and simplicity; of selflessness, acceptance and love.  In 2012, I seek to achieve this balance.  This is my resolution. 

 

Moments

A moment. It is the smallest possible denominator in life. We plan our lives in years, we set goals based on months, we have to-do lists by the day, but everything eventually comes down to the moment.  Life is an endless string of moments and I have a tendency to get swept away in them.  For that single instant, to be completely bewitched by living, breathing, feeling the splendor of a moment – it truly is a beautiful thing.  I look back at nights sitting on the beach in Diani gazing up at a spectacle of stars; I recall long drives on winding roads towards unchartered lands to watch a thundershower over the Rift Valley; I can close my eyes and remember fondly stopping on the side of the road near a farm to bite into a succulent Malindi papaya before it reached the city market.  I could fall back in these moments again in a heartbeat because they bare the possibility of a lifetime of happiness.  And at the end of the day, that’s what we all crave.  An eternity of happiness. 

But what happens when the moment is not one of happiness, but of heartbreak?  What happens when that single second evokes so much emotion that we get lost in the moment – where the lines of reality and fantasy become so burred, that it is impossible to find our way out?  I have faced that fear every single day for the last year and a half living in East Africa – not knowing if today is the day that the pain will be too great, the stories of life and death will be too overwhelming, the disparities in quality of life will be too disheartening that I will lose myself in the field and not be able to find my way out.  There are days when I feel paralyzed.  I feel like the solutions are beyond me, are beyond us all.  I feel like what I have to offer pales in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.  In those moments, I pray for a hand to hold me, for a voice to comfort me, to guide me out of the moment and back to a place where I can do something about it.  A place where my head rules my heart. 

But maybe the heartache is part of a masterfully crafted plan to facilitate action.  An unmotivated head is worthless until it is combined with an unrelenting passion to drive it – and what better motivator than pain.  There is so much pain in this world.  So much pain. I have borne witness to only a fraction of it and even that has been enough to unnerve me.  I can close my eyes and picture babies in an urban slum outside of Nairobi being tied and locked in confined spaces while their mothers seek work for the day.  With no stimulation and no engagement from a caregiver, they tend to grow up with physical and developmental delays, thereby hindering their chances of thriving in an already disabling environment.  Images like that haunt me, but also motivate me to step up to the plate and do something about it.  They invite kindness and humility but equally, summon the ability to think critically and strategically – a perfect marriage between the heart and the head.  

I can close my eyes and imagine the man who finds shelter near the matatu stand by my flat in Nairobi.  His feet are bare, as he paces back and forth mindlessly by the side of the road.  His hair is in disarray – likely not having been washed or shaved in months.  His body is filthy and his pants drape past his waist, weighed down by the empty soda bottles he ties to his make-shift rope belt.  His mind is not here. It is clear this fellow is suffering from serious psychological distress; one amongst a growing number of people who can no longer afford the rising cost of living in Kenya.  My heart bleeds for him while my head ponders his options for seeking help in a country where good quality healthcare is costly and mental illness is not readily accepted in society. 

 I can close my eyes and picture being held up in a queue of traffic and hearing the slightest tap on my window.  It’s a child, a boy of 7 or 8-years old with his hands moving from his stomach to his mouth, showing his hunger, begging me to do something about it.  In my travels, I have come across many street children – and it never stops hurting, it never stops being startling to see a child run after your car shouting ‘mama, mama’.  I am still a child in many ways, still exploring the world, figuring out my place in it.  But to these children, I am a mama with money.  I could use my heart and give all that I have to offer, but I choose to use my head to question whose pocket my Shillings end up in.   I seek to use my head to find an alternate, more innovate way to make a difference in the lives of these children. 

Success is as much driven by the heart as the head, and my heart has found its place at the core of life’s moments.   When you strip away the complexity of the world, all you are left with are moments.  And a moment – whether filled with happiness or pain – is the most beautiful gift of all.

Authenticity.

We all have flaws.  Small imperfections built into our design plan.  They tend to teach us something, or help us grow in some way – and for the most part, are innocuous by nature.  But we also all have the flaw, that one glitch in our DNA that holds us back from becoming the people we are meant to become. Shakespeare described this as a tragic flaw, pointing to Hamlet’s inability to act and MacBeth’s ambition as the cause of their demise.

If Shakespeare had told my tale, I always thought he would point to my inability to iron as my tragic flaw.  Definitely an image-compromiser and a relationship-breaker.    It is only after leaving the capitalist woes and materialist urges of North America that I realize my tragic flaw has always been my desire to fit in.  Unconsciously or not, every choice I have made – where to shop, what movie to watch, which radio station to listen to – has been influenced by an unrelenting craving to find a sense of belonging.   In many ways, I have had to – because I have grown up in a society where admitting to having not seen Avatar is considered to be blasphemous and not having a Facebook account is simply unforgivable.  We are unquestionably influenced by our peers.  Research shows that we are exhibiting an unparralled distrust of governments and institutions and tend to make decisions based on what our friends are doing or people we choose to trust.  But if you take influence one step further – and make decisions often unknowingly to find a sense of belonging amongst others, to be able to fit in better, that’s when life becomes tricky…and voila, my tragic flaw.  

And then I came to Africa.  A place where my skin colour is ten shades lighter than my fellow matatu-commuters and my ability to deal with the scorching heat of the Coast puts the community to shame. 

Working on primary health care initiatives in rural communities, I spend many of my days in areas far removed from the chaos of cars and distraction of poorly dubbed Mexican soap operas.  I do not fit in by any means.  I walk through villages to the sounds of children yelling ‘mzungu!’ or ‘white person!’ – children who are bewildered by the colour of my skin and the feel of my hair. I engage with women whose life experiences could not be any more dissimilar to mine and play with their babies whose upbringing does not bare any resemblance to the playgrounds and Sesame Street characters of my childhood.  And yet, in spite of the marked differences in appearance, in attitudes, in goals, it is here in the field that I feel a genuine sense of belonging.  Sitting in a plastic-roofed hut, eating beans and chapatti with community members , I forget about our differences or our lives being oceans apart – at the end of the day, we are people lost in a conversation about the joys of football or the perils of drought.  The field has a magical way of stripping down the clutter and noise of this world down to its simplest elements and creating an enabling environment for conversation and connection.   

My work in East Africa has shown me that maybe we all try too hard to fit in.  We perceive superficial, materialistic commodities as entry tickets into a world where we can all relate to one another and feel a sense of belonging, only to forget about connecting with people on a much more fundamental level.  When you shift your focus from what you have to what you feel, you will find connections in the most unlikely of places – because at the end of the day, we are all linked together by core human emotions.  Common threads of hope and love, of longing and loss, of pain and sadness. 

A mama who spends her days rearing chickens to pay her children’s school fees in a rural East African village is no different than a stiletto-borne woman on a blackberry in New York City who sends her children to a private school on the Upper East Side.  Both women are connected by a relentless desire to provide the best for their children.  Young African boys playing football with a ball made out of scraps on a dusty makeshift field without shoes are no different than a group of children playing houseleague soccer on a well-manicured pitch in London. There is a sense of absolute joy and energy – and a need to play – that unites these children, no matter how far apart their worlds may be.  A young toto strapped to the back of his mother with a kanga as she walks to fetch water is no different than a baby sauntering through the streets of Queen West in his stroller.  Both are curiously taking in their surroundings, developing notions of the world they will soon grow up in. 

There is immense value in the plurality of thoughts and peoples.  But there is also something to be said about finding commonalities, shared points of connection amongst people who on the surface, could not be more unlike one another.  I have learned that no matter how many hours I spend practicing my Kiswahili or how many kangas I wear, it is impossible to not stand out in a rural Kenyan community.  But for the first time in my life, instead of hiding behind the shadows or trying to blend in, I seek to embrace the difference.  No longer do I wish to fit in – instead I wish to connect with people at a more basic, fundamental level because this is where trust develops, where ideas begin to flourish and where community development should lay its roots.

The Genetic Lottery

My name is Sabrina Natasha Premji and I am a lottery winner. The genetic lottery, that is. I am a 23-year old woman born and raised in Toronto, Canada. I grew up playing t-ball in a recreational league and going to pottery classes after school. I have had access to good quality education and health care services. My life has been inculcated with reality television, Facebook status updates and fast food chains. Safety, security, stability — these are not words that have ever crossed my mind because in my world, they are a given. I am educated, I am independent, I am empowered.

But my winning ticket in this genetic lottery could have easily been given to someone else. And my story could have been written much differently.

I could have been born in a rural East African community at the hands of a traditional birth attendant – an unskilled, untrained woman who would be paid in kind or the equivalent of a few dollars to deliver me. Unskilled deliveries outside health facilities are a reality faced by approximately 50-60% of women in sub-Saharan Africa – often because of the unavailability of transport to reach a health centre, the lack of funds to support a skilled delivery, or a cultural belief of appearing as a coward within the community for seeking medical services. My umbilical cord could have been cut by a used razor, greatly increasing the risk of infection. If my mother did not survive – as every minute, a woman dies during labour or delivery primarily due to postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, obstructed labour and sepsis – I would be without breast milk, a crucial element to the development of a healthy immune system and likely be amongst the 3.5 million children worldwide that die of diarrhoea, malaria, malnutrition or other treatable diseases each year before their 5th birthday.

Assuming I am still alive and my family is able to afford school fees, I have the privilege of walking kilometres each morning to attend school. It is here that I am exposed for the first time to a world of possibility – of reading and writing, of learning English, of making something of my life. I dream of being a teacher. However, in spite of being motivated and working hard every day to excel at my studies, my marks fall short to those of my male classmates. Why? Because I miss one week of school each month during my menstrual cycle. Since I do not have access to sanitary napkins – a yearly supply of sanitary napkins to keep one girl in school costs about $30 – and the school I attend does not have running water or pit latrines, it is nearly impossible to attend classes during days of menstruation. My absenteeism is noticed and I join the other 87% of girls in East African communities who do not complete primary school.

Uneducated and unskilled, I spend my days assisting in household chores and helping raise my younger siblings. I am soon married to a man who is twice my senior and shortly thereafter, contract HIV/AIDS. The prevalence of condoms has increased dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa however, it is commonly seen as a method of preventing HIV/AIDS and not as a form of contraception, resulting in 50% of new HIV/AIDS infections occurring within marriage or cohabiting couples – a statistic further propagated by 11% of men and 2% of women in sub-Saharan Africa reporting extramarital partners. For months, I live my life as a nobody – a stranger to the world, a stranger to myself. I have no identity, no status, no national ID card – I am not seen as a person until I give birth to my first child. I give birth to a child almost every year in the years to follow – partly because of limited knowledge around family planning methodologies, partly because of fear of refusing my husband and partly because if some of my children die of disease, I will have other children who can support me as I age.

To the outside world, I am perceived as a passive spectator; a coward who does not take ownership of her life. But how can I, when every day I am worried my children may fall sick and I will not have the financial resources to care for them? How can I, when my community is struck by drought year upon year and cannot harvest enough crops to make a living? How can I, when I fear for my daughter’s safety as she walks for miles to fetch our daily water from the community water pump? I am constantly living in survival mode. Every day is a struggle. My life comes to an end at the tender age of 55, and I can only hope that my children may be blessed with the opportunity to craft a better life for themselves than I could.

My name is Sabrina Natasha Premji and I have won the lottery – but the problem is, I am a winner in a game I don’t want to play. Because this isn’t a game, this is life. My takings – good education, access to quality health care, food security – should not be winnings to the lucky few. Disparities in economic opportunity, death due to preventable diseases, uneducated women because of lack of sanitary napkins – these are realities that are unacceptable in an age when the Kardashians gross US$65 million a year and a Jersey Shore star racks in US$100,000 per episode.

Too often, we turn away from these harsh realities because it is easier not to look, it is easier not to care – because once we begin to care, it becomes our problem. When we accept it as our problem, we often feel helpless because the injustice of the world seems beyond our reach, Our challenge is to throw ourselves into the middle of it all – to internalize the situation as much as possible and seek to understand its complexity; to allow ourselves to feel a visceral reaction to stories of others without becoming paralyzed by the emotion; to contextualize the issues from a grassroots perspective while equally being able to step back far enough from the situation to understand how to solve it; and to use the innovation and technology that all too often we take for granted to engage and empower communities to develop locally-based, sustainable solutions. I suppose I am a so-called winner of the genetic lottery but what matters most is what I choose to do with those winnings.  I choose to make a difference.