Andrew Youn has lived in rural Africa for the last 11 years, learning from the largest group of poor people in the world: smallholder farmers. When he first visited Kenya in 2006, he was an MBA student who knew very little about farming. During that first trip, he met two farm families. One family was harvesting two tons of food on a single acre of land and thriving; the other was going hungry. He began asking questions.

Eleven years later, the organization he founded, One Acre Fund, serves more than 600,000 farm families, providing them with the financing and agricultural training they need to increase their yields and climb out of poverty. Youn is also the co-founder of D-Prize, an organization that funds early-stage startups that are innovating better ways to distribute proven life-enhancing technologies. He is a former management consultant at Oliver Wyman, and he received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.