To sustainably address the vast social and environmental challenges in Africa, Africa’s grassroots social organization Sustainability for Africa is trying to make things right.
For most of Africa’s remote communities, social innovation has to be pioneered solely by the small grassroots organizations and social entrepreneurs working alongside local people—if present at all anyway. The social sector quite often is the only immediate vehicle of change for the average rural African household in responding to local constraints—from alternative energy solutions to building clean water sources.
But often, the small community-based organizations themselves do not have support for their activities. Besides, traditional donor agency funding has shown to have a very shortlived impact and is increasingly inaccessible for most of the social innovators that work at the frontlines of different causes for the millions of poor Africans.
The goal of this campaign is to reverse the cycle of poverty for Africa’s rural poor by building a Self-Sustaining Africa’s Grassroots Social Sector—as this is the turning point for social change in Africa’s remote poor communities. Rather than work on getting individual families out of poverty, they work through an Africa-wide capacity building for the key social sector players at the grassroots, change will be bottom up and literally sustainable.
They aim to define this goal with our own agribusiness social enterprise and then will use our own enterprise-generated finance to create an Africa-based Impact Investing Program to nurture other small African nonprofits and entrepreneurs championing social and environmental innovation by taking up social business models.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
