Closing the rural gender gap - Episode 66
In this episode, you’ll hear from the winners of this year’s IFAD Gender Awards and learn how they're building a prosperous, more gender-equal future for farming.
Today’s most pressing problems will need cross-sector collaboration and innovation at all scales. Solve is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on driving social and environmental impact through open innovation and partnerships. We find social entrepreneurs from around the world and connect them to a network of people – including those here at MIT – who can help their impact scale up.
Each year, Solve runs four Challenges, on themes around learning, health, sustainability, and economic prosperity. We select eight promising solutions around each Challenge. These solutions are as diverse as the contexts they tackle – our 33 Solver teams from the 2018 Challenges are based in 15 different countries, are primarily led by women (61 per cent), and are a mix of non-profit, hybrid, and for-profit business models. Our themes frequently overlap with IFAD’s mandate around agriculture and rural development, whether in providing better information, inputs, and market access for farmers or ways to have healthcare and education reach every community.
This year Solve is collaborating with IFAD on an interactive session at the Governing Council because we care about the same issues and have a shared set of goals. IFAD is a leader in supporting large-scale approaches to rural development and connections between governments. Solve brings expertise in selecting the most promising entrepreneurial solutions to meet global challenges, and convening a diverse array of leaders from the private sector and civil society – large and small corporations, foundations, NGOs, investors, social enterprises, academic institutions – to mentor and support them.
The plenary session will introduce IFAD’s Governors to five impressive entrepreneurs, working on five very separate problems:
By working together, Solve aims to help IFAD’s Member States understand how social entrepreneurs and small-scale innovators are tackling big problems in local contexts, how those solutions can support states’ large-scale goals, and how states and entrepreneurs can partner to drive change at scale. We’re excited to have these innovators tell their stories to a governmental audience, and to see what partnerships are created to inspire future innovators in all sectors and at all scales.