Launched in 2008, NEXT is revolutionizing the Nigerian media. Dele and 55 young people are bringing honest, unbiased investigative reporting to a continent, country and city whose gigantic potential is stymied by corruption, the wealth gap, and an acceptance of the status quo. By its example, NEXT aims to change Africa¹s future by changing expectations, elevating debate, remaining incorruptible and holding elites and governments to account.

Running a 24-hour newsroom on diesel generators, due to a dilapidated electricity grid and attempts at sabotage. Despite efforts to quash their popularity, 234NEXT.com is the most trafficked news site in Nigeria. While Nigeria has one of the highest rates of newspaper consumption in the world, established papers are paid to keep big stories off the front page. The expectation that ads buy silence makes revenue a challenge for NEXT, but they’ve reported stories that have been buried for a generation in the face of constant official resistance.

NEXT revealed that almost the entire government (including three former presidents) had been bribed individually by Halliburton, and separately that the Oil Minister was sitting on foreign oil company boards in a blatant conflict of interest. No prosecutions or resignations occurred. NEXT revealed that despite the country's poverty, Nigeria’s legislators were the highest-paid (and least efficient) on the planet. When NEXT revealed that the nation’s biggest oil tycoon had ‘forgotten’ to pay $600 million in taxes over five years, officials were forced to seal off the tycoon’s residence to recover taxes - unprecedented for the wealthy in Nigeria. That story, although huge, was ignored by all other publications and lost NEXT scores of advertisers.

NEXT’s biggest scoop was that President Yar'Adua was secretly brain dead and not “returning soon from a Saudi hospital” as promised. Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan had not been authorized to step up, paralyzing the government and letting the First Lady take over the patronage machine. The story had immediate impact. Goodluck Jonathan was made acting president by the legislature (despite an attempt to install the comatose President in the executive residence) and State Security Services (SSS) forces stormed NEXT’s offices. The attack on NEXT was held off only by a few local police and the intervention of the SSS’s chief. Today Goodluck Jonathan is the elected President of Nigeria.

NEXT began on Twitter before launching a website and then the print newspaper. The site 234Next.com, receives over 3 million impressions and 600,000 unique visitors a month. As the technological landscape of Africa changes, NEXT is moving to an SMS and mobile-based platform. The economics of news are complicated by outright sabotage (paying newsmen to put NEXT under other papers or dump them), but NEXT has taken the steps to make sure its content remains accessible across Nigeria and Africa.

Ultimately, the goal of NEXT is to unshackle the immense potential of Nigeria by destroy both the elite's web of corrupt patronage and shake the Nigerian people out of their sense of helplessness to change their country.

Founded in 2006, Rocketship Education, is building a national network of high-performing urban college preparatory elementary charter schools. Rocketship’s mission is to eliminate the achievement gap in public education, by proliferating its network of K-5 charter schools in high-need neighborhoods throughout the country. Each Rocketship school has a clear and simple goal: that its students achieve grade-level proficiency upon graduation from elementary school. Rocketship's goal rests on evidence that the path toward college must begin much earlier in a child’s life. Research has shown that third grade achievement is highly correlated with college attendance and graduation. Rocketship’s first school, Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary School (RMS), opened in August 2007 in San Jose, CA. Its second school, Rocketship Sí Se Puede Academy, opened in the fall of 2009; a third school, Rocketship Los Sueños Academy, opened in the fall of 2010. Two additional Rocketship schools will open in the fall of 2011; Rocketship will expand its network to 30 schools by 2015.

Rocketship¹s success is due to three core values: Individualization, Leadership and Empowerment. Individualization is made possible by the hybrid school model, which combines traditional classroom teaching with individualized instruction using tutors and technology to meet the specific needs of each and every student. The hybrid school model confers significant advantages in three areas: academic achievement, teaching quality/leadership, and financial sustainability.

First, teachers can maximize classroom time for instruction, guided practice and extending critical thinking skills, while scheduling tutors and technology for students¹ core skills acquisition, independent practice, assessment and remediation/acceleration. In addition, the hybrid school model creates significant cost savings, which are reinvested in programs and people to drive school quality. Third, by reducing staffing requirements, it is easier to fill all our classrooms with top-quality teachers. Finally, this model enables Rocketship schools to operate solely on traditional public school funding, without the need for philanthropy. By individualizing instruction, developing great classroom and school leaders and empowering parents to transform the political system, Rocketship will continue to drive world-class student achievement.

A transformed Africa begins with a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders. Patrick Awuah founded Ashesi University in 2002 with a bold mission: to create a new kind of university, one that focuses on quality, ethics and personal empowerment. Ashesi University aims to be the spark of a revitalized Africa; a catalyst for new enterprises, new solutions and a model for other universities in Africa.

Ashesi University offers a 4-year undergraduate liberal arts education with a focus on business, technology and leadership. The rigorous liberal arts education promotes critical thinking skills that give students the confidence to tackle complex problems and make positive contributions in any setting. Ashesi students participate in a required four-year leadership seminar series, which challenges them to discuss issues critical to building a better society. Students identify ways they can be of service in selected communities and volunteer their time, knowledge and skills. Examples of Ashesi student projects include: teaching basic business skills to former child soldiers from Liberia, volunteering at orphanages and working with NGO’s to provide women micro-financing to support their businesses.

The university currently enrolls 424 students, 46% are women and close to 40% of the student body receives financial aid. The Ashesi experience is made rich and varied, with curious students from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds from across 14 different African countries.

Ashesi has graduated 173 students to date and nearly 100% of Ashesi alumni have found quality employment within months of graduating. Africa’s top firms value their problem-solving skills, work ethic and ethical behavior. While some are starting their own businesses and others are helping existing businesses to succeed; each is helping to revitalize the local economy.

Ashesi’s goal is to broaden their impact within Africa by growing to 2,000 students while maintaining their selective standards, small class sizes, and world-class academic quality. The university has recently broken ground on a new campus outside of Accra, where students of diverse backgrounds can live and study together.

A successful NY optometrist, Jordan has devised an innovative way to deliver affordable reading glasses to some of the world's poorest hardest to reach communities. He created franchise partnerships to use a "business in a bag" model containing everything that a rural entrepreneur needs to start a business selling reading glasses, thus creating jobs in underserved communities while providing glasses on a sustainable basis for the poor, for whom loss of income due to deteriorating vision is most devastating. VisionSpring now has over 850 "vision entrepreneurs" who have sold nearly 1 million pairs of glasses in India, Mexico, Latin America, and Africa.

Dr. Jordan Kassalow launched VisionSpring (formerly Scojo Foundation) in 2001 with the goal of meeting the global market failure for reading glasses. While working as an optometrist in the developing world, Jordan noticed that over 40% of his patients were losing their jobs because they could no longer see to work. Without clear vision, weavers could not set their looms, farmers could not sort seeds, and artisans could not see to create intricate designs. The loss of income due to deteriorating vision was devastating to poor communities. A pair of ready-made reading glasses, a basic product available in every drugstore in the US, would restore their vision and productivity, yet reading glasses were not available to those living on less than $4 a day.

To address this market failure, Jordan realized he would need to devise a creative, innovative system for delivering affordable reading glasses to the world’s poorest, hardest-to-reach communities. The answer? A “Business in a Bag” containing everything that a rural entrepreneur needs to start a business selling reading glasses, thus creating jobs in underserved communities while providing glasses on a sustainable basis for the poor.

Jordan first focused VisionSpring on developing replicable systems for training entrepreneurs in Latin America and India. In 2006, as a result of his leadership training as a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, Jordan began to develop creative strategies for broadening VisionSpring’s impact to reach millions in need and to create the long-term, lasting global impact that first drove his idea for VisionSpring. He recognized an opportunity to license VisionSpring’s Business in a Bag model to existing rural networks, such as microfinance borrowers and community health workers, thus reducing the burden of building costly new infrastructure and vastly speeding up the time it takes to reach scale. VisionSpring “Franchise Partner” organizations would benefit from the addition of an income-generating product along with the transfer of skills and knowledge gleaned from VisionSpring’s rural sales experience.

Scojo estimates that its economic impact to date is more than $70 million in increased earnings in the world’s poorest communities. A pair of VisionSpring reading glasses can yield a more than 17-fold return on investment in increased productivity for the wearer per year. Further, VisionSprings Vision Entrepreneurs, most of who work on a part-time basis, earn more than $400 in additional income per year. VisionSpring believes its long-term, global impact will occur on multiple levels.

Currently, VisionSpring is building one of the first global networks of organizations providing goods and services to the “Base of the Economic Pyramid.” In the long-term, VisionSpring aims to be the catalyst that proves to large optical and healthcare companies that poor communities represent viable markets, thus prompting the global business community to serve the rural poor with affordable, life-improving products and services.