Ponce Ernest Samaniego is Co-Founder and CEO of Outliers, a social enterprise that serves as outsourced business expertise for nonprofits in the Philippines. He is a participant in this year’s WISE Learners’ Voice.

Ponce co-founded Outliers in his senior year at the Business Administration program of the University of the Philippines. Together with a young and dynamic team, he is driven by the mission to empower civil society groups through the channel that they know best: business development. By merging traditional practices of aid organizations with efficient, market-based approaches, Outliers is effectively turning charities into sustainable social enterprises.

They currently serve nonprofits VF (Visayan Forum), Futkal (Football in the Streets), Law of Nature Foundation, Mano Amiga Philippines, and CASA San Miguel Foundation.

Outliers was named Philippine Winner out of 156 social businesses in the BiD Network and Citibank’s Business in Development Challenge 2010, and is supported by the Starbucks Foundation, VF, Japan Environmental Education Forum and the Global Changemakers Programme (British Council).

Ponce is a British Council Global Changemaker (GCM). As a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus Mobility with Asia Scholarship from the European Union, he spent a semester in the International Business program of the University of Warsaw (Poland) in 2009.

He is also an active environmental advocate and has represented the Philippines recently in international forums such as the ASEAN Youth for Sustainable Development in Indonesia and UNEP’s Southeast Asia Youth Environment Network and the World Youth Summit for Volunteering in Singapore.

He is currently working with the College of Business Administration of the University of the Philippines to incorporate social entrepreneurship in its curriculum. After WISE, he heads to Vienna to represent the GCMs at the Global Social Business Summit 2011 organized by the Grameen Creative Lab of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Prof. Muhammad Yunus.