Rashvin Pal Singh
Group CEO
Biji-biji Initiative
Malaysia
Rashvin Pal Singh is the Group CEO of Biji-biji Initiative, one of Malaysia’s pioneering and award-winning social enterprises that champions sustainability. Biji-biji Initiative comprises subsidiaries across a few industries such as ethical fashion and circular economy solutions. In 2019, Biji-biji won the Common Objective Leadership Award in the United Kingdom and in 2018, they were recognised as the Social Enterprise of the Year at the Sustainable Business Awards.
Rashvin was a panellist at the World Social Enterprise Forum 2019 in Addis Ababa and selected as an Obama Leader for the inaugural Asia Pacific cohort in 2020. He serves as Vice President of the Chamber of Social Entrepreneurship Development Malaysia.
Rashvin graduated with an accounting and finance degree from Bristol Business School. He spent four years of his early career in the corporate world as a manager at the Advisory Division of PwC Malaysia.
Ren Wan
Co-founder & CEO
JupYeah & LookMatters
Hong Kong
Ren Wan is Co-founder of JupYeah and LookMatters as well as an advocate of environmental issues, green living and slow fashion. Ren Wan established herself as a magazine editor and worked at WestEast Magazine as managing and contributing editor at MING Magazine. In 2011, she pursued a postgraduate diploma in sustainable development in University of London and co-founded JupYeah, which promotes swapping and raises awareness on overconsumption and waste. In light of excessive fashion consumption and waste in Hong Kong, JupYeah launched LookMatters, a clothing brand in 2014 to promote second-hand fashion.
Anshu Gupta
Founder Director
Goonj
India
Anshu Gupta graduated in communications and economics and started his career as a freelance journalist. He founded Goonj in 1998 to highlight some basic but ignored needs of people on the development agenda, using clothing as a metaphor.
Goonj has grown notably by turning urban waste into a tool to trigger large scale work on various rural development issues. An Ashoka and Schwab Fellow for entrepreneurship, he has built a trash-based economy by creating barter between efforts of rural communities and urban surplus material as two new currencies. Goonj has done massive disaster relief and rehab work in India, turning disasters into opportunities to reach resources and attention to the most ignored communities.
Listed by Forbes magazine as India’s most powerful rural entrepreneur, Anshu and Goonj have received recognitions including Ramon Magsaysay award, World Bank’s Development Marketplace award, Changemakers Innovation award and Jamnalal Bajaj Award for Fair Business Practices.
Nurfarini Daing
Co-founder and CEO
Youth Trust Foundation
Malaysia
Nurfarini Daing is the Co-founder and CEO at myHarapan which was established in 2010. It has engaged and developed over 26,000 Malaysian youths and funded over 140 social initiatives. It’s also a research partner of the Centre of Asian Philanthropy and Society in Hong Kong which is currently developing a Doing Good Index in, and for, 15 economies.
Nurfarini garnered 18 years of startup experience including business development, training and coaching for SMEs as well as unemployed graduates through past employments such as Multimedia Development Corporation of Malaysia. She has received many awards including the Social Innovation Leadership Award by World CSR Congress, India, and others such as the Women Icons Malaysia by the Business Excellence and Research Group (BERG) Singapore.
She graduated from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, in accounting and finance.