The WorldWise Storytelling Project aims to redefine success from a gendered lens, utilizing storytelling as a vehicle to showcase women making change in complex, revolutionary, and structural ways.
We ultimately aim to be the harbingers of a much-needed paradigm shift around current definitions of success, and on a larger scale, attitudes toward women entrepreneurs and their work.
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Download File: https://ashoka.code95.info/app/uploads/2021/08/WhatsApp-Video-2021-08-20-at-3.26.11-PM.mp4?_=1Download File: https://ashoka.code95.info/app/uploads/2021/08/WhatsApp-Video-2021-08-20-at-3.26.11-PM.mp4?_=1The Women’s Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship is a global initiative positioned within the global South that aims to elevate the number, power, and knowledge of female entrepreneurs.
Led by Ashoka Arab World’s Regional Director and Vice President of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Iman Bibars, WISE sets forth an actionable framework through which stakeholders in the social innovation system can better invest in and advance women social innovators.
“When we reframe the definition of success in a way that better includes and celebrates women social entrepreneurs, we curate an ecosystem that is more likely to inspire and nurture women changemakers.”
“As INGON took on more cases of human trafficking, we needed to scale deep and change the mindsets of law enforcement and the public [that victims did not choose this]. To achieve this, we designed trainings and capacity-building workshops that help them analyze the rights that every human being has and that the Indian Constitution protects.”
“[Success is] changing someone’s mind, someone who is angry and totally in despair to being someone who wants to change things and who knows she can change things, especially as a girl. It’s so powerful; it’s something that fills your soul.”
“Beliefs are deeply rooted. It’s character deep, impressively deep, and profound is what lasts. We all want to have access and time to make a lasting difference.”
“When I began working on the economic development of the black population, I understood that it was not enough to work just there – I had to work in the whole environment, the whole ecosystem to make a change, influence public policy, [and] create a narrative in media.”
Mainstream definitions of success across the social innovation ecosystem have long been rooted in a business-franchise model, placing more value on scaling out – an impact model where large numbers of people are reached and a larger amount of revenue is accrued. Through WISE, Ashoka aims to uplift the concepts of scaling up – affecting laws and policy, and scaling deep – creating initiatives that structurally reformulate mindsets, cultural norms, patterns of behavior, and ultimately, societal systems.
Ashoka’s 2018 Global Impact Study found that women Fellows work within systems and are more likely to spread their idea locally, inspiring replication of their idea by other groups or institutions within their country of residency. Female Fellows were also found to be more collaborative and reflected a higher tendency to impact behaviors and mindsets: 76 percent of female Fellows reported influencing societal attitudes and cultural norms as core to their strategy, compared to a lower percentage of males.
In a recent partnership with the Citi Foundation, Ashoka conducted an initial survey of women Fellows from around the world to learn about the ways in which they conceptualize their own success and impact.