By Adrian Nzamba
Discovering social entrepreneurs!
For
as long as there has been poverty and inequality in the World, so as there has
been a presence of people in groups or just as individuals who have always been
there with establishment and initiatives that played a fundamental key role in
supporting other who were in deep struggles of poverty and inequality. And
because of their prestigious personalities they were given names such as
visionaries, humanitarians, philanthropists, reformers, saints, or simply great
leaders. Attention was paid to their courage, compassion, and vision but rarely
to the practical aspects of their accomplishments. For example, we might have
learnt about Florence Nightingale on how she ministered the wounded soldiers
but not that she built the first professional school for nurses and
revolutionized hospital construction.
These
people of such caliber are regarded today as Social Entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship has been defined by
many scholars throughout the years but till to date there is no universal
recognized definition but the most widely cited definition was of offered by
Greg Dees who draws on the thinking of the economists Jean-Baptiste Say and Joseph
A. Schumpeter, who argued that “entrepreneurs
improve the productive capacity of society and provide the ‘creative
destruction’ that propels economic change.” Dees holds that social
entrepreneurs do the same for social change, creating new combinations of
people and resources that significantly improve society’s capacity to address
problems.
Is Social Entrepreneurship the best solution to our Social problems?
Social
entrepreneurs are and have always been developing innovative business models
that blend traditional capitalism with solutions that address the long-term
needs of our planet. They are tackling chronic social problems, ranging from
healthcare delivery in sub-Saharan Africa to agricultural transformation in
East Asia and public-school funding in the United States. Social entrepreneurs
are working in close collaboration with local communities, incubating
groundbreaking-and often lifesaving-innovations;
modeling synergistic partnerships with governments, companies, and traditional
charities; and building business models that deploy technology and enable
networking to create wins for investors and clients alike.
New challenges, new solutions!
According
to World Economic Forum Global Agenda of 2015, it listed deepening income inequality
and persistent jobless growth as the major challenges faced by the World to
date. Where we have the rich continue to accumulate wealth at record breaking
rates while the middle class is still struggling. And at the same time if we
look back at UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon statement during the 54th
session of the commission for Social development he said that “2016 must be a
year of “global traction” to ensure 3.1 billion people worldwide are not left
behind in the race to end poverty”. These two statements clearly shows that the
continuous growth of our global challenges is overwhelming and there is a need
for a global intervention. Meaning it’s high time to start talking about social
entrepreneurship and making the environment feasible for social entrepreneurs
to intervene and create solutions to our pressing challenges.
Opportunities for the Social Entrepreneurs!
One of
the biggest opportunity social entrepreneurship has is the nature of people we
have in our today’s World and Soushiant Zanganehpour[1]
puts it best by stating that “There are
many factors contributing to this including the rise of Generation
Y (millennials)[2]. This generation is a new, connected,
socially-conscious, energized global cohort who finds this concept very
appealing. This is demonstrated by the products they buy, and by the companies
they seek to work for”. This means that this generation is positive and willing
to support social enterprises due to the current state of problems of which are
most felt by the same generation.
Access to fund has always been one of
biggest challenges for both startup and scaling up social enterprise, but according
to Harvard business review of January-February 2012 titled “A new
approach to funding Social Enterprise” showed that an increasing number
of social entrepreneurs and investors are coming to realize that social
enterprises of all sorts can also generate financial returns that will make
them attractive to the right investors. This realization will dramatically
increase the amount of capital available to these organizations.
References:
- David Bornstein and Susan Davis
(2010) Social Entrepreneurship What everyone needs to know, Oxford
University Press.
- Antony
Bugg-Levine, Bruce Kogut and Nalin Kulatilaka (2012) A new approach to
funding social approach, Harvard Business Review
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/skollworldforum/2013/05/02/the-rise-of-social-entrepreneurship-suggests-a-possible-future-for-global-capitalism/#21880645e13b
- http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251981
- http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/02/ban-2016-must-be-year-of-traction-to-propel-2030-agenda/
- http://reports.weforum.org/outlook-global-agenda-2015/
