Unreasonable Mentors

Ken Banks

Social innovator, founder and author

Ken is an Unreasonable Mentor. Ken was part of Unreasonable FUTURE 2021, and has advised over 16 Unreasonable companies.
Ken is a British award-winning social entrepreneur, mobile technology and global development expert with an undergraduate major in Social Anthropology with Development Studies. He is best known for developing FrontlineSMS, a mobile messaging platform used today by non-profits in over 190 countries around the world. He is a PopTech Fellow, a Tech Awards Laureate, an Ashoka Fellow and a National Geographic Explorer. In 2013 he was nominated for the TED Prize. In recognition of his pioneering work, he was presented with the 2017 Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science by the Association for Computing Machinery in the USA, and in 2018 appointed Visiting Fellow at the prestigious Judge Business School in Cambridge. Ken is also a published author. His first edited book, The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator, was published in 2013 and came with a Foreword from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A follow-up, Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, published by Kogan Page, was released in 2016.