Closing Plenary of the 2007 Skoll World Forum

Speakers

• Roshaneh Zafar

  Speaker

  Managing Director, Kashf Foundation

  Ms. Roshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation which is Pakistan’s first specialized microfinance institution catering exclusively to women. Through her work, Ms Zafar has demonstrated the business case for investing in women led microfinance and shown that a scalable impact driven program can work in Pakistan. Ms. Zafar started her career as a Women in Development specialist for the World Bank and soon realized that to truly change womens lives economic access was pivotal which led her to founding Kashf Foundation. Ms. Zafar sits on several board and committees where she advocates gender mainstreaming and client centricity. Ms. Zafar has been recognized for her work via multiple awards and accolades including the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Skoll Award, Schwabb Foundation Award, Vital Voices Award and others. Ms. Zafar holds a Masters degree in Development Economics from Yale University and a Bachelors degree in Finance and Economics from the Wharton Business School.

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• Martin Fisher

  Speaker

  Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, KickStart International

  As a pioneer in using business models to solve poverty, Martin is the co-founder & CEO of KickStart, a non-profit SE with a mission to enable millions of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to pivot from rainfed to irrigated farming, earn a lot more money, adapt-to-climate-change & climb out of poverty. KickStart designs & promotes lowest-cost irrigation technologies & to-date over 390,000 farmers have used its pumps to grow, harvest & sell high-value crops year-round, independent of rains. Their highly profitable & resilient farms have lifted 1.5M people out of poverty. With almost no irrigation in SSA, millions more can irrigate & gain income & food security. KickStart partners with hundreds of organizations to promote irrigation, develop new technologies, innovate new ways to reach & finance farmers, & advocate for system changes. With a Cornell BSc, a Stanford MSc & PhD, a Fulbright in Kenya, and many awards, Martin is a Skoll & Schwab SE & a Stanford Engineering Hero.

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• Ed Miliband

  Speaker

  Leader, Labour Party

  Edward Samuel Miliband is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the South Yorkshire constituency of Doncaster North since 2005 and served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Born in London, Miliband graduated from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, becoming first a television journalist and then a Labour Party researcher, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's confidants and Chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers. As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown appointed Miliband as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 28 June 2007. He was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 3 October 2008 to 12 May 2010. On 25 September 2010, he was elected Leader of the Labour Party.

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• Roger Martin

  Speaker

  Institute Director, Martin Prosperity Institute

  In 2017, Roger was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers. Roger Martin serves as the Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management and the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competitiveness. From 1998 to 2013, he served as Dean. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants. He has published 11 books the most recent of which are Creating Great Choices written with Jennifer Riel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017) Getting Beyond Better written with Sally Osberg (HBRP, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (HBRP, 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 25 Harvard Business Review articles. Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego and Verizon. A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Roger received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

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• Mindy Lubber

  Speaker

  Chief Executive Officer and President, Ceres

  Mindy Lubber is the CEO and President of the sustainability nonprofit organization Ceres. She has been at the helm since 2003, and under her leadership, the organization and its powerful networks have grown significantly in size and influence. As a well-known global thought leader, Lubber has inspired capital market leaders to consider all material financial risks and opportunities—including those related to climate change, water scarcity and nature loss—in decision-making. She has also received numerous awards and recognitions for her leadership including the ’Champions of the Earth award, the UN's highest environmental honor; the Barron’s Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential women in U.S. finance every year since 2020; the Climate Visionary Award from the Earth Day Network; the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation; and the Nonprofit Times 2022 Power & Influence Top 50.

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• Colin Mayer

  Speaker

  Peter Moores Dean, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies, Saïd Business School

  Colin Mayer is Peter Moores Dean of the Saïd Business School, Professor of Management Studies and Professorial Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Mayer was the first professor at the Saïd Business School, the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals and was instrumental in creating the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)). He has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, MIT and Brussels University (ULB), where he was the first Leo Goldschmidt Visiting Professor of Corporate Governance. He is a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute and an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Mayer is Chairman of Oxera Holdings Ltd, one of the largest independent economics consultancies in the UK.

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• Taddy Blecher

  Speaker

  CEO, Community and Individual Development Association, Community and Individual Development Association City Campus

  Dr Taddy Blecher is CEO of the Maharishi Invincibility Institute and the Imvula Empowerment Trust, CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association, and Chairperson of the SA National Government team on Entrepreneurship, Education, & Employability. He is a pioneer of the free tertiary education movement in South Africa, helping to create six free access institutions of higher learning as well as co-founding the Branson School of Entrepreneurship with Sir Richard Branson. As a result, over 21,000 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment, and moved from unemployment into the middle-class. As a qualified actuary and management consultant, Dr Blecher is passionate about the approach of Consciousness-Based Education, a system of education developing the full potential of every student. This has led the Maharishi Institute to winning multiple prizes including the first prize in a global competition for the most innovative education initiative in the world

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• Larry Brilliant

  Speaker

  Founder and CEO, Skoll Foundation

  Dr. Larry Brilliant is a physician and epidemiologist, CEO of Pandefense Advisory, senior advisor at the Skoll Foundation and a CNN Medical Analyst. Previously on the boards of the Skoll Foundation and the NGO Ending Pandemics; president and CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund; vice president of Google, and founding executive director of Google.org. He co-founded the Seva Foundation. Earlier, he co-founded The Well, a progenitor of today's social media platforms. He was an associate professor of epidemiology and international health planning at the University of Michigan. He lived in India for nearly a decade where he was a key member of the WHO Smallpox Eradication Programme for SE Asia as well as the WHO Polio Eradication Programme. He was the founding chairman of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS); member of the World Economic Forum's Agenda Council on Catastrophic Risk; and a "First Responder" for CDC's bio-terrorism response effort. He is also an author.

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• John Elkington

  Speaker

  Founder and Executive Chairman, Volans Ventures Ltd

  John Elkington is a writer and thinker, a serial-entrepreneur and an ‘advisor from the future’. John is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development and is credited with coining the ‘triple bottom line’. In 2004, BusinessWeek described John as “a dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades”. John serves on some 30 boards and advisory boards, where a key part of his role is to channel the future into the present across a wide range of disciplines. He is writing his 19th book alongside Jochen Zeitz, former CEO of PUMA and now co-chair, with Sir Richard Branson, of The B Team. The book is provisionally titled The Breakthrough Challenge, exploring ways to institutionalize tomorrow’s bottom

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• Bill Drayton

  Speaker

  Founder and CEO, Ashoka, Ashoka

  Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organizations and public service. As the founder and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Bill Drayton has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, growing a global association of over 3,900 leading social entrepreneurs who work together to create an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ world. Ashoka Fellows bring big systems-change to the world’s most urgent social challenges. Over half have changed national policy within five years of launch. As a student, he founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University. In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School. He worked at McKinsey & Company for ten years and taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While serving the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, he launched many reforms including emissions trading, a fundamental change in regulation that is now the basis of much global as well as US regulatory law, including in fields beyond the environment.  Bill launched Ashoka in 1980; in 1984, he used the stipend he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is Ashoka’s Chief Executive Officer. He also chairs Ashoka’s Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working! Bill has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. He has been selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2011, Drayton won Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Award and, in 2019, Drayton was elected as member of the American Philosophical Society. Other awards include Honorary Doctorates from Yale, NYU and more.

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