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Essmart
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Co-Founded with Diana Jue Rajasingh
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2013 Global Fellow
bold idea
Deliver life-improving technologies to the people in India who need them most by developing innovative distribution channels embedded within existing local retail networks.
organization overview
Despite the invention of hundreds of life-improving technologies, such as affordable solar lanterns, clean cooking appliances, and efficient agricultural tools, few of these products are reaching their intended end users because distribution channels are broken. Essmart is a distribution company in southern India that ensures these life-improving technologies reach these users by creating a marketplace for these goods in places where people already shop—local mom-and-pop retail stores—by aggregating a catalog of existing, high-quality products; demonstrating them in stores; and training shop owners to sell them. Essmart fills a significant gap in the global supply chain while improving local businesses and enabling technology access for rural households.
Personal Bio
Jackie Stenson is Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Essmart, which distributes clean energy agricultural products to smallholder farmers in rural India. She is also the Managing Director of UNLEASH, a non-profit that runs innovation programs that unleash the next generation of young changemakers tackling their communities’ most pressing sustainable development challenges. Jackie has developed and taught programs for: Harvard, MIT, Georgia Tech, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), INSEAD, and the UN Global Compact Network UK. An engineer by training, Jackie designed technologies to improve livelihoods in 11 African countries and India, until she realized the real challenge lies in framing complex problems and designing for dissemination. Her work aims to help new solutions be designed for widespread impact and adoption, while unlocking the potential of the impact-driven leaders who drive these solutions.
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Impact Location ?
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Organization Structure ?
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