Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 : Prema Gopalan, Executive Director of Swayam Shikshan Prayog received the Award of Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 from Prof. Klaus Martin Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum at the SEOY 2019 Award Ceremony held at Delhi on October 3 2019, awarded by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Jubilant Bhartia Foundation. She was also one of the 40 awardees who have received the award for Social Innovation Driving Change and Transforming Society at the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit (SDI) held in New York on Sept 23, 2019 https://www.sspindia.org/awardsandrecognition/
'Social Entrepreneur of the Year' India 2008, Finalist Prema Gopalan Nov 24, 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6ntLf-9X0
Founded by Prema Gopalan in 1994, Swayam Shiskshan Prayog (SSP) is building networks of rural social businesses that are co-created by private corporations and women survivors of disasters such as the 2004 Asian Tsunami and the Latur and Gujarat earthquakes (of 1993 and 2001 respectively). With the facilitation of SSP, networks of rural women entrepreneurs have launched retail businesses in renewable home energy products, home groceries and health funds in partnership with BP (previously known as British Petroleum), LIC and others.
Rural Community Leaders Combatting Climate Change https://vimeo.com/227254208 Swayam Shikshan Prayog, an Indian NGO, trains rural women in entrepreneurship and builds their capacities for marketing clean-energy projects in their communities. Currently, an active network of 1,100 women entrepreneurs is working across 8 districts in India. The women provide a complete ‘ecosystem’ approach as clean-technology users, educators, providers and supporters in their communities, which helps make it easier for people to adopt energy-efficient technologies and products that address climate change.
SSP functions as an “umbrella” organization, a consortium of four social enterprises to execute its activities on-ground. These social enterprises collaborate to form an enabling ecosystem for women entrepreneurs.
Through our entities, SSP builds women-led rural markets at three levels:
• We make women part of the rural economy through business-coaching.
• We extend monetary support to rural women foraying into entrepreneurship.
• We create a network of these women entrepreneurs to scale their operations through strategic partnerships between corporate and local women entrepreneurs.
Our entities function independently as sustainable enterprises, managed by CEOs at the helm of business development and operations.