Visit the official COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs website here.
NEW YORK, USA, August 27, 2021. The World Economic Forum’s COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs and the Schwab Foundation is proud to publish its Top 50 COVID-19 Last Mile Responders - a list of 50 leading social entrepreneurs and 12 social ecosystem initiatives. Each of these 62 leaders is delivering scaled responses to fight the COVID-19 crisis on-the-ground in India, where, triggered by the highly contagious Delta variant, the pandemic reached unprecedented and devastating levels earlier this year.
Often operating outside of mainstream response efforts and unable to rely on related funding streams, social entrepreneurs have had an outsize influence in the crisis, channelling much-needed resources and services to vulnerable communities, especially those in the difficult to reach ‘last mile’. The list was curated jointly with Catalyst 2030’s NASE and Aavishkaar Group.
The way these entrepreneurs and innovators have approached this crisis holds valuable lessons for mainstream responses. Each of the organisations on the list addresses at least one of four priority areas of on-the-ground need: Prevention and Protection; COVID-19 Treatment and Relief, Inclusive Vaccine Access, and Securing Livelihoods.
Their responses have demonstrated - over and over again - that social entrepreneurs are able to play a vital role in addressing big problems. They have the experience and understanding of context as well as the trust of local communities, which allows them to trial new and local solutions, get to hard-to-reach people and places, build coalitions of local actors, and solve challenges at a local level.
As the world battles to get past this pandemic, the promise that social entrepreneurs hold for building a more inclusive and sustainable world urgently needs to be recognized. And the resources and support that these vital local actors need to do their work and scale up their impact deserves to be mainstreamed.
The 86 members of the COVID Response Alliance have joined hands to stand by the social entrepreneurs in their networks to shape an inclusive recovery. In India, the top responders are ready to break through the persistent income and opportunity barriers that stand in the way of such a recovery and the Alliance calls on all sectors to join them in backing them - and others on the frontline - everywhere.
PVBLIC Foundation is a proud member of the World Economic Forum’s COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs and is committed to helping tell the stories of social entrepreneurs who are helping the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
To learn more about the Top 50 COVID-19 Last Mile Responders, visit: https://widgets.weforum.org/lastmiletop50india/
To learn more about the World Economic Forum’s COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs, visit: www.wef.ch/covidsocial or www.schwabfound.org
To learn more about the regional hosts of this initiative, visit: Catalyst 2030/NASE: http://www.catalyst2030nase.org, Aavishkaar Group: https://aavishkaargroup.com
For Top 50 media inquiries: Contact Flora Rosenow, Interim Communications Lead: flora.rosenow@alliance4socent.org
For Alliance related queries: Contact Katerina Hoskova, Community Lead: Katerina.Hoskova@weforum.org
