Social Entrepreneurs of the Year

2/26/2013 - You’ve heard their stories before: Andrew Youn ’06 gives impoverished farmers the tools to grow themselves out of poverty. Njideka Harry ’12 connects women and children in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa with the rest of the world through technology.

Youn and Harry have both been named Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. The two Kellogg alumni were honored this afternoon alongside 22 other entrepreneurs at an award ceremony in New York City.

It’s not news to us that these Kellogg graduates are changing lives around the world, but with each new accolade, they prove once again that business can be a force for good in society.

Humble heroes
While their proposed solutions look very different, Harry and Youn have a common purpose in mind: to help people help themselves.

Youn’s nonprofit organization, One Acre Fund, gives the poorest farmers in Kenya and Rwanda small loans of high-quality seeds and fertilizer and shows them how to use an acre or less or land to grow enough food to feed their families — with room left over for a cash crop or two. The organization now serves 135,000 families.

Harry’s organization, the Youth for Technology Foundation, nourishes the people it serves with knowledge. Every day, YTF teaches women and children to use computers, navigate the Internet and set themselves up for success in a digital world. Since its founding in 2000, the organization has served more than 270,000 people in Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, the United States and Latin America.

Kellogg connections
Both One Acre Fund and YTF have strong ties to Kellogg.

One Acre Fund began as a business plan Youn drafted while he was a student in Kellogg’s Full-Time MBA Program. The organization has received awards from the Echoing Green Foundation, the Draper Richards Foundation, the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, SC Johnson, the Skoll Foundation, and Kellogg’s Larry and Carol Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice.

Though YTF was already well established when Harry enrolled in Kellogg’s Executive MBA Program, Harry worked with classmates in the program to open its newest branch in Soacha, Columbia, in 2011.