Five Indians have made it to the World Economic Forum’s 100 Young Global Leaders list. There were nine global leaders from South Asia, out of which five are from India. Besides, there are some persons of Indian origin in the US and Europe were also named in the list.
Five Indians includes: Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Shruti Shibulal of The Tamara Hospitality, Ambarish Mitra Founder Blippar, Hindol Sengupta Editor at large Fortune India and Rwitwika Bhattacharya Agarwal Founder of Swaniti Initiative.
Each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) selects 100 young leaders, under the age of 40, who are tackling the world’s most complex challenges with innovative approaches.
Selected into a five-year programme, this year’s class of 100 Young Global Leaders is split evenly between business and not-for-profit sectors – building a global community of peers who can capitalize on diverse talents, experiences and networks to bridge divides that exist in society and achieve more together than they could separately.
The Class of 2017 includes:
Jamila Abass: Founded M-Farm, which empowers Kenya’s smallholder farmers with price transparency and market access
Miki Agrawal: Started the clothing brand Thinx, which produces specialty underwear designed to replace feminine hygiene products
Shaharzad Akbar: Director of Open Society Afghanistan and a Co-Founder of Afghanistan 1400, a group dedicated to bringing young Afghans into the political process for a democratic and pluralistic Afghanistan
Aja Brown: The youngest mayor ever elected in Compton, California, and recipient of the National Action Network Martin Luther King Award
Man Chen: One of China’s most prolific and notable photographers and visual artists whose highly stylized work is immediately identifiable and well-known internationally
Molly Crockett: Neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, and one of the world’s leading experts in the fields of altruism, morality and value-based decision-making
Mouhamed Moustapha Fall: One of Africa’s top scientists and winner of the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship; he is Chair of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Senegal
Katie Hill: An innovator who leads Apple’s ambitious new Clean Energy Program, converting the company’s manufacturing worldwide to renewable energy
Jess Lee: First US female partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the best-known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley; after building fashion tech site Polyvore (and selling it to Yahoo for more than $200 million in 2015), she now advises other start-up founders
Naisula Lesuuda: The youngest woman in Kenya’s parliament and a leading advocate of women’s rights in the region
Ambarish Mitra: Augmented-reality tech entrepreneur, he ran away from home at the age of 15 to live in New Delhi’s slums; by the age of 17, he had 55 people working for him; 20 years later, he is the Founder and boss of Blippar, a mobile phone app business valued at $1.5 billion
Jesse Moore: Founder of M-Kopa, a pay-as-you-go energy provider for off-grid customers; it has connected hundreds of thousands of homes in East Africa to solar power
Maxim Oreshkin: Recently appointed Minister of Economic Development for the Russian Federation
Sarah Parcak: Director of GlobalXplorer, she is an archaeologist who uses satellites to uncover hidden ancient treasures; she estimates that we’ve excavated less than 0.001% of what’s out there
Yuefei Qin: Yale graduate who shunned a well-paid, big-city job to become a grassroots village official in a remote area of rural China; he and other Yale graduates founded Serve for China, a non-profit that empowers village chiefs and rural entrepreneurs across China; he has helped the villagers, NGOs and local government build water conservatories, roads and an online education platform for the local schools
Reihan Salam: Successful and influential conservative political commentator, Salam rose from a humble family background to Executive Editor of the National Review at the age of 35
Vijay Shekhar Sharma: Serial entrepreneur from humble origins who started college at the age of 15, where he set up a website that sold two years later for $1 million; he then started Paytm, India’s largest mobile commerce platform, valued at over $3 billion
Hooi Ling Tan: Co-Founder of GrabTaxi, a ridesharing app that faced down other tech giants and is shaking up the industry in over 30 cities in South-East Asia; a social business, the company is focused on safe transport, works with the World Bank to solve traffic congestion and has pushed up driver incomes by 30%
Lisa Walker: Chief Executive Officer of Ecosphere+, she is a climate change expert who works on developing the market for carbon assets and sustainably produced commodities generated through forest conservation and sustainable land-use projects
Luhan Yang: Chief Scientist at eGenesis Biosciences, she is one of the world’s top scientists on genome editing, and co-invented the revolutionary genome-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9 described by Wired as “the gene editing technique that could help eradicate health conditions and bring back the woolly mammoth” and named Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2015