UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #783

Overall Research Project Description This exciting research project emerged from a U.S. Department of State grant that sought to identify, understand, and help eliminate the barriers faced by social entrepreneurs of African Descent from across the globe. The data on which this project is based is highly novel and completely proprietary; drawn from a network of 55 Founders, Co-Founders, Presidents, or Executives of high-impact organizations working to address social issues across the globe. These founders span a diverse array of countries including Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Algeria, Morocco, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. All of the founders were of African descent, enabling us to better identify and explore opportunities and barriers faced by this unique population of change makers. Preliminary data analysis has yielded some very promising early results and informed the development of a working model we now seek to further refine and validate with your help. Given the current state of this project, we feel confident it is well-positioned to result in both a successful conference presentation and a peer-reviewed journal publication. We also expect our findings to be of interest to policy makers at a variety of levels and believe there is potential for our results to garner media attention.