In our prep interview with Alison Taylor we hear about ethical organisations and including employee voice. Her interview was part of our full story on activists and innovators in business: whatifwegetitright.com/season-3-activists-and-innovators

With many businesses confused about what ‘doing good’ actually means, employees are stepping up and pressuring their organisations to act on behalf of an interest greater than their company’s profits. They want to see their leadership take action and are speaking up as a political act of resistance. Employee activism is increasing globally with people are voting on their feet, ready to leave their jobs when their companies don’t perform. Join us as we explore how employee activism can be a force for good.

Are employees the social innovators and intrapreneurs organisations now need to lead by example? One thing is clear, innovators alone will not be able to drive the systemic change we need to address climate change and achieve social justice. The corporate world is being challenged from within - by activist shareholders and employees - to play its part. Join us as we explore the world of business and how resistance is necessary to make business a force for good.

In the fourth and final episode of this series we see the bigger picture – and why these entrepreneurs feel they need to keep on trying. Despite dealing with complexity on a day-to-day basis, they are determined to work toward their greater plan. Patrick, Mike, Douce, Washikala and Chance might be on to something. By starting and supporting these businesses, they have created a new model for people in the region to take ownership of their future. What are the ingredients for long-term impact and building ecosystems that flourish? We revisit Mike and Patrick and find out whether their approach could become a model for others. Could they be getting it right?

Episode three takes us deeper into the intricacies of setting up a business in an uncertain and complex environment. If social entrepreneurs can offer ideas and business solutions for community value, what role should government play? And how can NGOs and other societal actors get involved? Besides the insights from Douce and Washikala, we meet Chance Rwezi, who runs a coffee co-op on the island of Idjwi. While Douce and Washikala need to test their assumptions within their communities, Chance has challenges that lie outside the country. How does he see the balance between local and global economies and community value?

In episode two, we meet entrepreneurs in Eastern Congo who have made a business out of their personal mission. From her factory in Bukavu town, Douce Namwezi and her team want to improve the position of women in their communities and have set out to address this through the production of feminine hygiene pads. But can you set up a business around a product no one feels comfortable talking about? Six hours north, in the city of Goma, Washikala Malongo and his company Altech are on a mission to eradicate energy poverty. Do they have what it takes to build a nationwide business in a country where two thirds of households can’t afford the solar powered products they make?

In the first episode, we meet Patrick Byamungu and Mike Beeston, both founders of the Eastern Congo-based accelerator Ensemble Pour La Difference. After working as a journalist for 8 years, Patrick became tired of re-telling the same story. The story of emergency relief without lasting change. He meets Mike, who has sold his global digital agency and wants to know whether his human-centred business techniques could be relevant for entrepreneurs in the DRC. Together they start an accelerator for for-profit, social-aware businesses and tell us about the complexity of the task ahead.

After the success of season one, Tessa Wernink and Impossible take the What If We Get It Right? listener to the Democratic Republic of Congo. After decades of international humanitarian aid, local for-profit and socially-aware entrepreneurs are now setting up businesses with the aim of creating lasting economic value and contributing to long-term stability and peace. Wondering what it takes to get it right, the podcast uncovers the roles social entrepreneurship and planet-centric thinking play in building sustainable value for communities across Eastern Congo.

Cynthia Wandia is Co-founder and CEO of Kwara, a digital banking platform for savings and credit cooperatives, starting in Kenya. By digitising these community banks, Cynthia is showing how technology can be leveraged for communities who are often excluded from traditional banks. After studying electrical engineering and working in several different countries around the world, Cynthia set up Kwara in Kenya in 2018. It currently serves 28,000 members. In Kenya, mobile money is ubiquitous, and as more and more people own and can afford a mobile phone, payment options and innovations in business have reached a far greater number of people than ever before. But Kwara sees that simply introducing mobile payments is not enough to support people in ‘the last mile’. Cynthia and her team believe that the only really fair financial institution is the one that people build for themselves; something which humanity has been doing for centuries. Kwara’s aim is to help communities digitise so that they can own the benefits of technology that other sectors have been able to enjoy. SDG #10 Reducing Inequality www.kwara.com

Jona Christians is the co-founder and CEO of Sono Motors. He is on a mission to build a community-supported enterprise that makes solar-powered electric vehicles accessible to everyone. He and his co-founders started their enterprise straight out of school; making good on Jona’s life-motto that changing things for the better often means taking matters into your own hands. The Sion, their second prototype, is more than a car. On the one hand, it is a sustainable mobility concept - free of fossil fuels. On the other, it aims to change the way we think about the role of mobility and the ubiquity of cars in our daily lives. With the car’s solar panels, it partly powers itself; and once fully charged, its bi-directional charging technology can power other devices. Its design promotes shared ownership and ride sharing. In 2019, when Sono Motors was looking for funding, the leadership decided to not go with investors, but instead turned to the community to pull together and co-invest in the future of the company. With the pre-sales of the Sion, they managed to raise 50 million euros in crowdfunding. Since then, they have continued working with the community via road shows to inviting design suggestions. Sono Motors’ disruptive and innovative approach is changing mindsets in the automotive industry and has won them several awards: namely, the Entrepreneur of the Year in 2020 from Ernst & Young, and Most Innovative Start-up in Mobility from Forbes. UN Sustainable Development Goal: Affordable and Clean Energy Sono Motors: https://sonomotors.com

Carrie Chan is CEO and Co-founder of Avant Meats, a cultivated meat technology company based in Hong Kong. Carrie is a seasoned business leader with a passion for the environment, particularly for the impact of our food supply chains on the planet. After two decades of experience in delivering major real estate developments, and after becoming vegan, she turned her business acumen and her purpose to finding a solution to saving the fish in our oceans. Seafood is an important source of animal protein for China's inhabitants, as well as of great cultural importance. While there has been a movement to sustainable fish farming, Carrie and her team do not think it is enough. With their product, they want to show it is possible to serve people sustainable meat and protein without slaughtering animals. Avant Meats is China’s only cell-based food company, but it is far from the only company in this space globally. If it were up to business, these products would already be available on our supermarket shelves, but regulatory approval is still necessary to get there. Listen as Carrie talks about what it takes to build a business solving a global problem, in a space where the product precedes an existing market. Go to https://www.whatifwegetitright.com for full episode notes. https://www.avantmeats.com

Deborah Carter is an education entrepreneur. Founder and Business Director of New Tech Kids and more recently, Managing Director and Initiator of Preparation Tech. Both enterprises share the aim of transforming children from passive technology users into tech builders and creators - making sure they are ready to be more than tech consumers, applying technology to shape the future. Deborah made the leap into entrepreneurship in 2014 when she started New Tech Kids, an Amsterdam-based academy for after-school technology education. Since the lockdown, she has been creating content to educate adult influencers - those who play a role in helping kids move through education and make study choices. The Preparation Tech platform uses storytelling from diverse voices to showcase a wide variety of study, training and career paths that intersect with technology. In this episode, I spoke with Deborah about the importance of mindsets and role models to imagine what futures are possible; and about the evolution of education and the possibilities of following a non-linear path. Deborah gives tips on how to inspire kids to not only consume, but to start developing technology and why you can’t start early enough when it comes to talking about ethics and tech.

Dr. Shimrit Perkol-Finkel is co-founder, CEO and chief scientist at ECOncrete, a company creating environmentally-sensitive concrete solutions designed to develop rich and diverse marine life and counter the negative effects of using concrete in coastal areas. Concrete is the second most consumed material on our planet. Second, only to water. At the moment, it is responsible for 8% of humanity's carbon emissions. By changing the composition, texture and designs of the concrete ECOcrete produces, the team has created products that can be used by ports, waterfronts, breakwaters and piers to reduce ecological footprint and be resilient while fostering and preserving biodiversity. With over 20 years of experience in marine biology and ecology, as well as diving and exploring different environments, Shimrit is using her expertise in sustainable management and ecological engineering to inspire businesses, governments and project developers, to start using ecological products in coastal construction. You can find ECOncrete’s products in six countries, over six seas. They have been awarded #10 most innovative company by Fast Company and #13 of top 50 women-led companies by Forbes. Shimrit holds a B.Sc. in Life Sciences, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Zoology. She was also one of five women entrepreneurs to win the We Empower UN SDG Challenge, a first-of-its-kind global business competition for female entrepreneurs advancing the UN SDGs Website: https://econcretetech.com SDG #14 Life Below Water

Dr. Melanie Rieback, CEO and Co-founder of Radically Open Security, sees business as a form of self-expression, of creativity and activism. She also believes that social enterprises in their current form are not delivering and are stuck in an extractive capitalist dimension. Now she is on a mission to provide an alternative model, which she has dubbed post-growth entrepreneurship. She has already designed a university course (worth 6 ECTS points) for it, as well as setting up an incubator around the same thinking called NonProfit Ventures.  Melanie is a former Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) and has won a range of awards for her work. She has been named one of the fifty most inspiring women in tech in the Netherlands and one of nine most innovative women in the European Union. 

Simon is co-founder of Project Circleg, a social impact business empowering people to enjoy the freedom of mobility through prosthetic technologies. What started as an industrial design project to create an affordable prosthetic leg system from recycled plastic, has since developed into an endeavour with enormous potential for social and ecological impact. Setting up the game-changing initiative that Project Circleg aims to be, means more than creating a good product. It means embracing complexity and taking the time to prototype not only the product, but extending this prototyping thinking to include the whole system. From the production chain to the organization and the business model itself. Project Circleg shows that success depends on maintaining an holistic approach, something that remains hard in a business world that keeps pushing for simple marketing messages and product USPs. Project Circleg: https://projectcircleg.com/ UN Sustainable Development Goal: Good Health and Well-Being

Michel Scholte - Director & Co-founder of True Price and the Impact Institute is an impact economist. His mission is to move to an economy where all products have a true price and all organisations have a quantifiable impact statement. Simply put, a true price is one that accounts for the real cost and impact, both positive and negative, of our products. An integrated profit and loss is a company statement that includes not one form of capital (financial), but all six forms. Namely, natural, social, human, intellectual, produced and financial capital. Making it possible to redefine growth in inclusive and holistic terms. Michel is a dreamer and a doer who sees perseverance as an asset in reshaping the world. He runs two social enterprises: both of which offer tangible tools with which to hop on board the impact economy. As advisory board member for several impact measurement and valuation companies; as member of the Think Tank Worldconnectors, and as alumni of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers network, Michel reaches a wide network of organisations, including corporate, non-profit, governmental and education institutes with whom he collaborates for systems change.

Rishabh Khanna is Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer at Earthbanc, a green digital banking and investment platform. Earthbanc is 'aligning individual wealth with planetary health' and offering climate finance at scale. Rishabh has a long history of working with local communities on trust building from India to Sweden. In his role at Initiatives of Change, he sharpened an approach that puts social capital before financial capital. Rishabh is a truly mindful entrepreneur who is holding space for conversations in business that promote more consciousness in our economy and more meaning in our lives. SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions To get an account at Earthbanc, sign up at https://earthbanc.io/ for a to be launched Plus account with which you can support the planting and protecting of mangrove ecosystems in the Sundarbans, rainforests in Costa Rica and the cloud forests of the Himalayas.

In this episode, Tessa talks to Laura Youngson, an entrepreneur to the bone. As co-founder of Ida Sports, an enterprise making football boots for women, and co-founder of Equal Playing Field, a grassroots, non-profit initiative challenging gender inequality in sport, Laura is utilizing both for profit and non-profit models to catalyze change for women worldwide. With a degree in physics and in entrepreneurship, Laura thinks like a scientist while using the power of business to build a market for women and design for a different world. Ask her what she stands for and she’ll say opportunity, equality, respect. With four world records under her belt, she is challenging girls to become what they want to be and to not be limited by gender stereotypes. Ida football/soccer shoes are sold in 7 countries, check if you can buy a pair at https://www.idasports.co. To support equal playing filed, visit https://equalplayingfield.com UN Sustainable Development Goal: Gender Equality

While climate action seems low on many government agendas since the Corona lockdown, Tessa talks to Anastasia Kaschenko, CTO of Majik Water, a sustainability tech start-up harvesting drinking water from air for off-grid communities. An environmental scientist, award-wining entrepreneur and Google Singularity University graduate, Anastasia paired up with two female entrepreneurs in 2017 to work on sustainable water solutions. As a child of Ukrainian parents who emigrated to Canada, Anastasia’s immigrant journey has instilled in her a sense of humility, hard work and continuous flexibility. As CTO, she views breakthrough technology as a combination of human ingenuity, nature and innovation, and explains the complimentary relationship technology has to conservation and reuse when it comes to water solutions. Since 2017, Majik Water (‘Maji’ meaning water, and ‘K’ for kuvana, which means harvesting in Swahili) has deployed projects in Kenya, South Africa and India, providing sustainable water solutions for Fortune 500 corporations, paired with community impact projects deploying 20,000 litres of drinking water per month to drought-stricken regions. UN Sustainable Development Goal: Clean Water and Sanitation

As Corona continues to define our shared reality, Tessa talks to Pablo Santaeufemia, CEO and founder of Bridge for Billions, Ashoka fellow and Forbes 30 under 30. From his apartment in Madrid, Pablo talks about putting empathy and purpose at the core of innovation to create lasting solutions for humanity. An engineer by trade and a social entrepreneur by nature, he combines these two passions in an overall mission of democratizing access to quality entrepreneurship training, mentoring and opportunities. The online incubator Bridge for Billions has supported 1,118 businesses from 68 countries and offers a development program based on three pillars: learning-by-doing methodology, one-to-one guidance from mentors, and a global community of purpose-driven entrepreneurs. UN Sustainable Development Goal: Industry, innovation and infrastructure