Speakers - Ashoka

Potential solutions could include making households more aware of the nutritious qualities of food choices and the
consequences of food on health and the environment. This also raises the question of the target and scale of awareness
campaigns in order to offer healthy alternatives. Another solution could be to incentivize the establishment of retailers
and producers in under-served areas or for low-income populations. The objectives of the cluster are to identify sustainable
solutions developed by social entrepreneurs, and to look at how their innovations can be scaled up and replicated
to increase accessibility to sustainable and healthy food.
CLUSTER PARTICIPANTS:
Fellows include: Yvonnick Huet, Michel Nischan, Kristin Richmond, Kirsten Tobey, Vera Perino, Tobias Leenaert,…
Companies include: Sodexo, Danone, Edenred,…
Solutions to address fuel poverty
Cluster leader: Damien Desjonquères (Total). Cluster language: French
In Europe, an estimated 50-125 million people (7-17 percent of the total population), also known as fuel poor, are
incapable of meeting their heating needs without cutting down on essential needs. The population affected has been
increasing rapidly, given rising energy prices and corresponding fuel bills. The current price increase adds up to two
structural obstacles: the limited investment capacity from households in energy effi cient technology, and/or consumption
monitoring and management systems, and the lack of awareness of consumers regarding consumption practices. In addition
to this, the diffi culty to develop successful fuel poverty programs linked to the question of the fuel poor identifi cation
is another obstacle. Under response to this reality, the objectives of the cluster are to identify sustainable solutions
developed by social entrepreneurs, in Europe, and look at how their innovations can be scaled up and replicated.
CLUSTER PARTICIPANTS:
Fellows include: Johannes Hengstenberg , Grégory Gendre, Pavel Cincera, Gilles Reydellet etc.
Companies include: Total, Gdf-Suez, Schneider-Electric, Rexel etc.
Women’s Empowerment - The WE Alliance
Cluster leader: Christina Jordan. Cluster language: English
Over the past three decades, tremendous strides have been made in illuminating the importance of addressing gender
equality and women’s empowerment in local, national and global development. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear:
no society can achieve its full development potential when half of the population faces persistent socio-cultural barriers
to accessing the opportunities that development brings.
However, even despite increased global awareness of the critical roles that women play in development, no country in
the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap. Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce
half of the world’s food, yet earn only 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s
property. Less than 16 percent of the world’s parliamentarians are women, two thirds of all children shut outside the
school gates are girls and, both in times of armed confl ict and behind closed doors at home, women are still systematically
subjected to violence. (1)
All eight of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015 touch essential aspects of women’s well-being.
Solid evidence also shows that progress around gender equality in one goal often contributes towards progress on
a number of other development goals at the same time. Empowering women with education, for example, results in
signifi cant contributions to a nation’s economic growth, as well as to reduced malnutrition, fertility, and child mortality.
In order to accelerate the achievement of the MDGs, cross-dimensional and innovative approaches for enhancing
women’s empowerment are urgently needed. The WE Alliance is a response to that need, proposing a coordinated approach
to encouraging meaningful and far-reaching cross-silo collaboration between some of the world’s most effective
initiatives and innovators in the women’s empowerment space.
(1) http://www.undp.org/women/
CLUSTER PARTICIPANTS:
Fellows include: Josephine Nzerem, Katarzyna Batko-Tołuć, Sakena Yacoobi, Kathryn Hall-Trujillo, Alicia Leal, Ana bella
Estévez, Marie Haisová, Alice Freitas, Heather Cameron, Betty Makoni, Molly Barker,…
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