adminindividuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up – and remake the world for the better.
A social entrepreneur identifies and solves social problems on a large scale. Just as business entrepreneurs create and transform whole industries, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent and disseminate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value.
Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs primarily seek to generate “social value” rather than profits. And unlike the majority of non-profit organisations, their work is targeted not only towards immediate, small-scale effects, but sweeping, long-term change.
The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognise when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.
In the book “How to Change the World”, David Bornstein tells fascinating stories of some remarkable individuals – many in the United States, others in countries from Brazil to Hungary – providing life changing innovations for the social sector.
In America, JB Schramm has helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college. In South Africa, one woman, Veronica Khosa, developed a home-based care model for Aids patients that changed government health policy.
In Brazil, Fabio Rosa helped bring electricity to hundreds of thousands of remote rural residents. Another American, James Grant, is credited with saving 25 million lives by leading and “marketing” a global campaign for immunisation. Yet another, Bill Drayton, created a pioneering foundation, Ashoka, that has funded and supported these social entrepreneurs and over a thousand like them, leveraging the power of their ideas across the globe.
Their experiences highlight a massive transformation that is going largely unreported by the media. Around the world, the fastest-growing segment of society is the non-profit sector as millions of ordinary people – social entrepreneurs – are increasingly stepping in to solve the problems where governments and bureaucracies have failed.
Social entrepreneurship is practically non- existent in Zimbabwe. While economies globally are being changed and shaped by social entrepreneurs, Zimbabwe is lagging behind with no strong focus on social entrepreneurship. The country badly needs social enterprises that will shift paradigms and make large-scale change. There is a need for these innovative enterprises, such as the Grameen
Bank in Bangladesh that effectively transformed the concept of banking for the rural poor.
Today, the rural poor whom it serves own Grameen Bank. Borrowers of the bank own 90 percent of its shares, while the remaining 10 percent is owned by the government. The visionary and innovative Zimbabweans should play their part in changing the face of this nation, continent and even the world.
This can be done.
As Paul Hawken put it, if companies believe they are in business to serve people, to help solve problems, to use and employ the ingenuity of their workers to improve the lives of people around them by learning from the nature that gives us life, we have a chance.
The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society.
Drayton notes that social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades. And they are as realistic as they are visionary. As a result, they are very good listeners. They have to hear if something isn’t working; and, whenever they do, they just keep changing the idea and/or the environment until their idea works.
They are intensely concerned with the how-tos: How do I get from here to there? How do I solve this problem? How do these pieces fit together? Drayton goes further to say that the biggest problem is getting beyond the “you can’t” syndrome. The moment you figure that out, you’re on your way to flying. Anyone who cannot see problems around himself or herself is utterly blind.
All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution. Of course, you can do it. It doesn’t require brilliance. It’s just giving yourself permission and then being persistent.
Persistent in seeing the problem or opportunity and persistent in thinking about it until you have come up with some interesting ideas that might change the pattern. It’s really a mindset, not anything in the objective world – that is the problem.
Opportunities abound for social entrepreneurship in Zimbabwe and as stated earlier with the right attitude and focus, this can be done. With the opening up of the airwaves for instance huge opportunities are beckoning for community radio stations around the country.
The motive is not entirely driven by profit but to make vital information available to the people. Community newspapers are another opportunity beckoning as not all the people have access to the
mainstream media and a gap exists in that area. This concept is not entirely new and has existed for a long time.
Bornstein observed that social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, was a social entrepreneur who built multiple organisations that advanced pattern changes in his “field”.
Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide.
What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades, the emergence of millions of new citizen organisations. As always, let’s make money.
Online Reporter