We are thrilled to announce this year's finalists, a great global vintage, that proves that with determination, discipline, resilience and impactful connections, women social entrepreneurs and activists do achieve a positive social impact. This year, we see a lot of emphasis on indigenous rights, renewable energies, creative and sharing economies, and other strong future centric trends.

Servane Mouazan, CEO and Founder Ogunte, says:

“These women-focused awards are not about fluffiness and cupcakes. The women who are shortlisted for the Women’s Social Leadership Awards are real achievers and are not coasting on the buzz. They are incredible role models, challengers, and impactful decision-makers. They are not all conventional and they don't all sit at the decision tables that mainstream leaders recognise. Our role is to show the world that these social entrepreneurs and activists do create massive ripple effects and can teach a thing or two about changing the status-quo.” 

The Judges have selected 9 finalists in 3 categories and you have chosen your favourite finalist via the People's vote! 

Bidna Capoeira’s vision is to use capoeira as a psychosocial tool to help support children in refugee camps and vulnerable communities.

Our objectives are to provide relief, to support development through strengthening resilience and most importantly to bring joy into the harshest of environments.  We use sport, music and play, through the non-competitive art form of Capoeira. Originally brought to Brazil by slaves from Africa, its precedents of creativity in creating social cohesion and resilience in the face of oppression remain relevant to the communities we are working with today.  We also use life skills classes, counselling sessions, art and theatre as part of our psychosocial programme of activities.

Education is recognised as one of the most significant issues facing South Africa. More than 20,000 schools are failing.

Symphonia for South Africa is a Non-Profit Organisation with a vision to strengthen the fabric of South African society. We lead and initiate projects that are intended to engage South Africans in processes of nation building so that we can truly be a country that is "Alive with Possibility!"

We work to radically improve education outcomes in South Africa so that all South African children have access to Quality Education by 2022.

Bratindi started the campaign  in 2003, when Vedanta Sterlite – a UK based company - tried to extract bauxite from Niyamgiri. Niyamgiri is an ecologically sensitive and biodiversity rich zone in Odisha, India.

"Niyamgiri bauxite would come at the cost of clean water and pristine forest in an otherwise drought-hit district. It also represents an outright assault on the culture and religion of the indigenous people who live there."

"Permitting mining would pave the way for persecution of a minority community and deny legal protection for their religious beliefs," she adds.

I treat obstacles as challenges to work through...

In 1994 I intended to create a successful social business using the arts to change lives. Today Impact Arts is a national social enterprise, working across 14 local authorities in Scotland with 4000+ children and vulnerable adults annually doing precisely that.

Our vision is to be the world’s leading community arts organisation, and our strategic plan to 2015 outlines how we will do this – through excellence, global benchmarking and structured scale-up through replication and partnering.

First Power is designed to empower First Nations to gain access to and ownership of renewable energy.

Trust is a key issue in working with Indigenous communities

First Power aims to transform the world’s relationship to energy. Our work harnesses Indigenous wisdom, the power of culture, community ownership, while tackling poverty through meaningful work and business development. Clean energy is a platform for economic transformation. We support communities replacing diesel power with clean power, we co-develop commercial projects that sell back to the grid with communities retaining majority ownership.

People’s ‘sharing potential’ remains untapped.

My vision is to build a thriving Sharing Economy in which we share to live and live to share; where the need to own is transformed into the desire to access and everyone can be a supplier of goods, services and experiences; where collective capability meets common interest and we collaborate to protect our planet and create wealth for common benefit. Preaching environmentalism has failed to engage a mainstream audience, so our strategy is to build a fun, consumer facing brand making it easy for people to share via an online aggregator, a one stop destination marketplace of sharing and fun onland Crowdshare events.

Playing for Change’s mission is to find and support social entrepreneurs with innovative ideas and methods that can improve the world by removing obstacles to play. Play is a vital aspect of every child’s development and we are confident that even in the most depressive environments and hazardous situations, play can be a key to the future, empowering children and young people.  

Our selected social entrepreneurs – our Playmakers – are invited in to our incubator. The incubator is not a physical space, but a context where the social entrepreneurs get help to in turn help as many children and young people as possible. 

Operating from China, with programs throughout Asia, FYSE inspires, connects and accelerates social entrepreneurs and the field that supports them. We envision a world in which social entrepreneurs have the skills, resources and network to significantly address social and environmental challenges. We have 3 objectives:

1.Incubate and Accelerate High-Impact Women Social Entrepreneurs 

2.Facilitate a system-wide change for youth by building capacity in social entrepreneurship education

3.Empower and grow a pool to entrepreneurs to address the significant social and environmental challenges in Asia

What we are doing is the work that will be written in business textbooks of the future, not the textbooks of today. 

My vision is to inspire businesses to find new and disruptive ways of activating innovation strategies to critically embed social and environmental value into their core operating principles.

The defining element of these new strategies is a focus on intergenerational value creation – the creation of ‘positive externalities’. To fulfil this vision, I am committed to connecting business leaders with social entrepreneurs operating on the front line of social innovation. I do this because my son will be 40 in 2050 – a year when there will be 9 billion people on the planet, peak oil, peak water, peak fish as well as at least 2 degree warming.

I want to spend all my energy helping make the world a place that my son's generation inherits as fair, just and sustainable as possible.