Sarah Collins
South African entrepreneur, CEO and equality innovator Sarah Collins is best known as the creator of the Wonderbag, a $25million globally conscious enterprise. Over the past 10 years over 1.5million Wonderbags have been activated in the Western and Majority world. Sarah’s extreme dedication, resilience and determination has earned her Fortune Magazine’s Top 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, Oprah’s African Heroines and Fair Lady’s prestigious Woman of the Future Award.
The Wonderbag is a simple but revolutionary, non-electric portable slow cooker. The South African invention is saving lives from smoke inhalation, combating deforestation, providing time women to work and for children to go to school and preventing rape (82% of rapes happen while gathering firewood). Bill Gates, Chelsea Clinton, Jane Goodall and many other dignitaries and world leaders have lauded Wonderbag as a game changer.
Wonderbag is utilized in refugee and humanitarian interventions around the world and Sarah is working with The Red Cross, The GIZ and the UNHCR. Because it does not require electricity and reduces dramatically the need for firewood, the Wonderbag is essential in areas of deforestation and climate change. Wonderbag was accredited by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and awarded 1st place in the Climate Change Leadership Awards and Eskom’s 2012 Innovation Award.
Sarah is a fierce advocate for opportunity and agency for women and families in Africa and around the world. Sarah’s impact as a CEO and advocate for women and families has lead to her speaking at the 2013 Davos World Economic Forum, The Global Alliance in New York, The UN Social Good Summit, The Royal Geographic Society in London, The Eye On Earth Summit in Abu Dhabi and more. With over 10 years challenging international business models, Sarah is now known as the founder of Globally Conscious Capitalism, a movement which offers a fresh blueprint for aid agencies and the business community to work together in innovative ways that uphold human rights, honour human dignity and build sustainable economies.
After leading initiatives in this area for over 10 years, with successful partnerships with major corporations such as Unilever, Pfizer and Microsoft, Sarah now is inviting the global business community to participate in an alliance. The Alliance For Globally Conscious Capitalism is a call to action for businesses and aid agencies to come together under a common belief: the best global business models of the future will sell responsible, solution-oriented products and services and will scale ethically through human centred market entry and participation.
Before inventing and scaling Wonderbag, Sarah overcame immense personal challenges and loss, finding strength and purpose running for office in her native South Africa with a platform dedicated to justice and equality in her divided country. This commitment inspired her entrepreneurial endeavours, culminating in the invention of Wonderbag during a ‘eureka’ moment in 2008, inspired a memory of Sarah’s Grandmother using heat retention to cook for her family. Sarah Collins took an age-old cooking technology, that of simple heat retention, and reinvented it into a modern-day, life-changing, sought-after kitchen accessory, found in both the poorest and most affluent of homes around the globe. Sarah’s invention, and her continued work with foundations, aid agencies and business allies has cemented her reputation as a leader in alleviating time poverty and providing safety and entrepreneurial opportunities for women around the world.