Kunle Adewale Wins 2025 Social Impact Awards for Community Development, Inclusion

Yinka Olatunbosun

Kunle Adewale, a Nigerian-UK global leader, development practitioner and interdisciplinary artist has been recognised as the 2025 winner of Social Impact Awards for community development and inclusion at the world’s biggest Entrepreneurship Festival.

The Global Entrepreneurs Award stands as the ultimate symbol of prestige, celebrating a select group of the world’s most influential and transformative entrepreneurs and leaders. Reserved exclusively for visionaries who have redefined industries, propelled economies, and shaped communities on a global scale, this award honours exceptional entrepreneurs for their outstanding contributions to entrepreneurship, leadership, economic development, and global impact.

More than just recognition, this prestigious award opens doors to global endorsement, collaboration, and significant strategic opportunities, making it a key highlight of the Global Entrepreneurship Festival. A premier gathering of elite global entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, and policymakers to celebrate achievements and foster impactful global connections.

Kunle Adewale in his remarks shared “This award honours our shared humanity, collective greatness and the strength of a resilient community. It’s about sacrifices, stewardship, and servant leadership. Being recognised for my social entrepreneurship and leadership journey is humbling. This is proof that impact matters, but most importantly, that persistence matters even when there is no applause and the crowd falls silent. The determination to continue doing good for the greater good will not go unnoticed!”

Kunle was honoured at the Global Entrepreneurship Festival, in a ceremony held on November 21 to 23, 2025 hosted in Accra Ghana alongside exceptional entrepreneurs from across the world.

Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, expressed immense pride and enthusiasm for hosting the Global Entrepreneurship Festival (GEF) 2025, emphasizing Ghana’s role as Africa’s gateway, bringing economic growth, global visibility, and unique opportunities through innovation, youth empowerment, and sustainable development, with the theme focusing on AI-powered, sustainable entrepreneurship.

The Global Entrepreneurship Festival (#GEF), the world’s largest and one of the most transformative entrepreneurship events, is a global platform dedicated to celebrating and catalyzing entrepreneurship across different levels and sectors while advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through innovation, enterprise, creativity, technology and collaboration. Held annually during Global Entrepreneurship Week, the three-day experiential festival brings together business leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, MSMEs, creators, c-suite executives, startups, and policymakers from around the World.

Kunle Adewale a global arts and health leader He founded the Arts in Medicine Projects, the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowship, and the Global Mental Health Fellowship, training over 1,000 professionals across 60 countries and impacting more than 60,000 people.

As the Global Development Lead for the Global South Arts and Health Initiative, his programmes have reached over 500,000 people in 41 cities across the world. Kunle has pioneered major arts and health initiatives across Africa and worldwide through powerful collaborations with cultural organisations, government agencies, academic institutions, practitioners, and global health bodies.

He is a Global Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, University of California, San Francisco . His humanitarian arts work spans children, youth, people with chronic illnesses, disabilities, dementia, refugees, and communities affected by conflict, and has been featured widely in international media.

Recognised with multiple awards—including a dedicated “Kunle Adewale Day” in the US—he is also a Mandela Washington Fellow of the U.S State Department through President Barack Obama, UK Commonwealth Youth Worker Award winner, and a Global Talent Exceptional Leader.

His global works have been endorsed by the Arts Council of England and Museum of African American Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Recognized by the U.S. Department of State and spotlighted as Africa’s Future Leader by IREX. Kunle is also recipient of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers initiative, a multi-year campaign launched in 2017 to accelerate progress toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, focusing on data, storytelling, and leadership to tackle global poverty, inequality, and health crises like malnutrition and disease, highlighting progress, holding leaders accountable, and inspiring a new generation of activists and innovators

Adewale has been featured on Voice of America, The Guardian UK, BBC Africa, Reuters, Weltspiegel, The Commonwealth, TRT World, France24, Al jazeera among others. In 2025, he launched the Young Leaders for Arts and Health reaching over 300,000 people across the world.

Adewale currently leads one of the largest arts and health networks in the world. He is a collaborating partner with the University College London (Social Biobehavioral Research Group) on the GRACE-Epi project- A major new seven-year programme of Global Research on Arts and Cultural Engagement funded through a Wellcome Discovery Award aimed at advancing Epidemiological methods with focus on Global South and Global North countries; bringing together experts from the arts, humanities, social science, epidemiology, data science, and molecular biology.