September 2026

#GIFDescription: Ashoka Fellows Krutika Ravishankar, Tasso Azevedo, Jennifer Pahlka, Federico Garcea, Abiodun Adereni, Gabriela Agustini, and Kailash Satyarthi.

We are back with a new season, reflecting on how Ashoka Fellows have been responding to some of the world's challenges. These past weeks, El Niño fueled wildfires through southern Europe, South Asia and beyond, with Fellows turning emergency into evidence and action. Krutika Ravishankar's Farmers for Forests released a replicable fire prevention blueprint, while Tasso Azevedo's MapBiomas passed 500,000 validated deforestation alerts, tracking fire across Brazilian biomes. In parallel, Fellows kept pushing on how we see and understand the world. Weeks before the UN's new "Correct the Map" resolution, promoting map projections that reflect the true size of continents, Federico Garcea's Treedom argued for the change, noting that "If we see something as smaller, we also end up thinking about it differently than what it is". And today, as debate grows over uncontrolled AI and "the future of humanity", Fellows keep working for technology to expand our capacity to lead, decide, and contribute. Abiodun Adereni's HelpMum released the first counterfactual benchmark for maternal and paediatric AI; Gabriela Agustini's Olabi mapped digital exclusion among people over 60; Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi called for "compassionate AI".

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