THE EXTRAORDINARY ART OF SPARKING A REVOLUTION HIDDEN UNDER SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Dr. Pathik Pathak, born and brought-up in the United Kingdom, is a person whom has been successful in taking his passion for innovation to the supreme level. He is amongst the few lucky ones who learns for fun and it is quite obvious that a person like Dr. Pathak (graduated from University of Warwick and presently working at the University of Southampton) will be the pioneer in making social entrepreneurship the most attractive prospect for students. Having been able to understand the science behind innovation, Dr. Pathak moved to the Social Impact Lab and since has been the peerless pioneer in the field.

Dr. Pathak is presently the leader of the international works on social entrepreneurship at the University of Southampton. He has recently been honored with the fellowship of Royal Society of Arts along with the prestigious award of Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman in the year 2015. His extraordinary contribution in the field of modern education has been the key for bestowing of the mentioned awards.

Dr. Pathak is not different from other visionaries in the opinion about students’ possession of skill sets that help them in academics as well as in lives. When asked about the beginning of his journey, Dr Pathak admitted that he was interested in social entrepreneurship for quite long time and thus, after finishing the post graduation studies, he went on a world tour. The first stop was obviously India where he got the opportunity to witness the innovation stage of social entrepreneurship. In answering the question of his life goal, Dr. Pathak admits that he was and is still addicted to the fun of learning.

Speaking about Spark India Social Enterprise Camp, Dr. Pathak reveals the collaboration of Social Impact Lab with organizations like Awaaz de and Aakar in 2014. He also informs that Social Impact Lab is the place (with its headquarters at University of Southampton) that is keen in promoting social leaders and not developing social ventures.

Social Entrepreneurship is All About Doing Good in a Smarter Way

Recently, the world has witnessed the start-ups aimed at changing the world in a different way by recruiting the help of technology. Social Entrepreneurship doesn’t solve the consumer’s problems locally with the intention of maximizing profits, but it aims at bringing an irreversible positive change in the life of people of the society.

These startups are founded with an intention to bring in change to the present conditions in which people are living. It can be the campaign to make pure drinking water available to all or can aim to make sanitation facilities available. It can also be turning solar energy into electricity to make the lives of people, living in remote areas of the country, simple, and it can be developing livelihood skills, life skills or the skills to read and write. It can be anything, but the mission is common: making the world a better place to live in but with a twist. Yes, the approach is much smarter now.

Whether it is the 1:Face Watch Campaign to bring the change worldwide or TaxShe Services to provide an all women taxi services; or whether it is the IncloV app with several aids integrated into it to make it accessible to the differently-abled or the Nudge Foundation to pull people out of poverty by making them employable. Every solution for a social cause is based on technology.

Being a social entrepreneur signifies someone who has stood up to advance and develop the quality life of people who deserve to have much more than what they seek. It is all about putting in the concept of technology in the market of the business of bringing in a positive and substantial change in the society.

Social Entrepreneurship Through UIDAI

Millions of people in India lacked any sort of formal basic identification documentation. This made their conditions worse and kept them from the ability to participate in the country’s economic and legal systems. It was in 2008 that Nandan Nilekani mentioned this problem through his book, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation (Penguin Press).

The next year, he was asked by the country’s Prime Minister to turn this idea into a reality and was appointed as the Chairman of a new government agency, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Social entrepreneurship is a business with the intention of doing something that is beyond better with the intention of doing social benefits making low or no profits. Nilekani’s efforts in UIDAI are an apt striking example of social entrepreneurship practiced within a government context.

 

He foresaw that just an identifier program would not be enough to enable a poor the access to the civic activities / welfare. After a lot of brainstorming, the agency under his leadership came with the idea of “multimodal biometrics, combining the irises of both eyes and the fingerprints of all 10 fingers, the digital signature” as a concept of proof.

Social entrepreneurship is all about bringing an overall positive social change. It is all about laying a change that was imagined and enacted. Not only this, the change is sustained as well. Effective Social Entrepreneurs acknowledge the dynamic of understanding the social problem, its causes and then come out with the solutions to navigate through these issues. It is all about envisioning the fundamental equilibrium change and is specific about the beneficiaries and working of the program. The more creative an entrepreneur is in applying the resources, the more sustainable his efforts come out to be. With reduced cost and increased value, the change model becomes sustainable and achievable, like that happened with UIDAI.

3 Tips to Excel in Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurs run businesses for profit but their clear and more specific mission is providing the benefits to the society as a whole and that is the reason their social mission is integrated into their business model. Like any other business, Social Entrepreneurship too has certain areas that can help you get an edge.

Let us have a look at the 3 Tips that are must to excel in Social Entrepreurship:

1. Planning:

Planning is the most crucial stage of any business as a good or bad business plan might have a make or break impact on your organisation. A good business play should clearly lay down what, when, and why you intend to do that and what will be the outcome after acknowledging the various risks involved. It is very important for a business to have a complete business plan that highlights the problems as well as provide the solutions for them.

2. Customer Focus:

For any business, customer focus is of prime importance and this becomes all the more important in case of social entrepreneurships. Their probable customers are the donors or sponsors who have little or no personal benefit. The second type of customers can be the traditional customers who buy the services you are selling and the third type of customers can be the ultimate beneficiary as per the mission of the organisation. All the three types have their different needs and require proper focus and attention in order to be successful.

3. Execution:

Social Enterprises are never in the race of doing better than others because they aim to provide that benefit which the society is deprived of and thus offers, what no one else is offering. Thus, they need not focus on flawless execution, but simply on execution. Finally, what is the importance of executing properly rather than execute flawlessly with no benefits to the society?

Challenges in Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship’s have been in existence for several years, but of late, the globalization and the intense competition it brought, the sector has taken a prominent role in the business sector.  There are not many differences between a social entrepreneurship and a business except the basic point of differentiation that states that a social enterprise’s mission and vision are socially derived with a motive to add social value and the monetary benefits come second, while any business is carried with an intention of earning profit first. There are many challenges faced by social enterprises and business enterprises that are similar in nature, yet there are many challenges that are specific to Social Enterprises only.

Let us have a look at the various Challenges in Social Entrepreneurship:

• Funding: Since the prime motive of social enterprises is not profit, they are always in search of investors who will invest for a social cause. Funding is the biggest challenge a social entrepreneurship faces. The primary available funding opportunities include donations, government funding, etc. The profits can be there or may not be there but they are totally run for the benefits of the society.

• Offers Objective Value: Social enterprises focus on social values more than the monetary values. Since the value provided by these enterprises can’t be measured in terms of money, it becomes difficult to convince the investors, etc. for funding.

• Difficult to remain Focused on Strategy and Long-Term Focus: This is something that remains unidentified by the social enterprises. As their first and foremost purpose is to create social benefits, they have multiple goals and activities attached to every role which are difficult to align with each other.

• Stick with the Mission: It is mostly a challenge for social enterprises to stick to the same strategy all through the life of the organization and thus, the probability of a drift from the planned social value can be seen.

How can Social Entrepreneurship Change the World as a whole?

Social Entrepreneurship is a very simple and productive approach towards entrepreneurship, yet its existence is always overshadowed due to the vagueness and lack of understanding. As a term, social entrepreneurship is defined as the combined activity that involves social cause as well as business intuition and taking these business techniques to pressing social issues and still manages to generate profit.The main factor that differentiates a non-profit organisation work and a social entrepreneurship is that the non-profit organisations are heavily loaded under the funding restrictions while the social entrepreneurs not as for them, it is a business activity for a social cause.

For any entrepreneurial activity, there is no limit to success and the same goes with social entrepreneurship as well. It has been proven to be the most successful if applied correctly. The best example of this is environmentalism. Bill Drayton, the father of social entrepreneurship aptly defined social entrepreneurship as “business with a cause.”

When a society entrepreneurial organisation grows, the society is bound to grow in terms of value and ethics. When the commitment of entrepreneurship meets the social cause, the overall development of the society is bound to happen. As a generation, there is a tremendous opportunity for growth to work in an environment for the better development of the society. Social Entrepreneurship has brought the time wherein developers and entrepreneurs possess more power than ever, we, as citizens of the country should try our best to incorporate these principles in our entrepreneurial activity.

Moving forward, there will be the need of new business models with a “Why” attached them. The sharpness of the business with the commitment of environmentalism comes together to provide a sustainability prone social entrepreneurship practices. The examples of this can be the solar energy inspired One Earth Solutions, etc.

One Earth Designs and their solar stoves

Solar power is one of the best renewable energy sources available to help fight environmental issues. 4 million people die every year from household smoke and suffocation. University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health’s expert in climate effect on household energy Kirk Smith thinks it as a bigger threat than the outdoor pollution.

Nevertheless, Catlin Powers has the means now to help save the planet and million from this issue. She is the founder and CEO of One Earth Designs, which makes a signature solar stove product, named SolSource. In 2007, she was on a project to monitor climate change in the Himalayas, where she realized after a chat with local Tibetan that no matter how blue the sky is, the real gasses are in their houses. The air pollution in their homes was 20 times more than that found in Beijing then while being three or four times as per today’s standards. A typical stove that uses wood may have the effect of 400 cigarettes.

Powers also heads as program leader for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard. For her, nations already underdeveloped increase burden of social security by not having the resources. Hence, she came up with an idea that uses the sun and nothing else to cook on a grill. SolSource is 92 percent efficient, costs $549 and has sold more than 4,000 units in 60 countries. Knowing it works only on the sun, which may hinder its performance at night and where sun is not available for most of the day, OED has worked on an energy-storage battery that is also 80 percent efficient. OED offices are located in Hong Kong, Boston, Massachusetts, Xining, western China, and Beijing. Apart from products like SolSource, OED also helps education initiatives in Himalayas, while conducting researches on heat-retaining phase-change technology and low-cost water testing.

Root Capital

William Foote is the Founder and CEO of Root Capital and has great experience with raising and lending funds, Emerging Markets, Value Chain Finance, Environmental Conservation and Impact Investing. It was in 1990 that Foote and his wife were traveling and came across a bunch of vanilla growers who were not able to fetch the short-term loans and as a result could not get involved in the International Markets. This motivated Foote to develop an organization which can help the farmers with their requirements of the short term credits.

This gave birth to “Root Capital”. Root capital is basically a socially invested fund that aims at growing the rural prosperity in poor and backward areas of Africa and Latin America by lending funds, imparting training, finances and strengthening their connections with the market so as to help grow their small and growing agricultural businesses.

Root Capital has an experience of more than ten years in impact investing. Its main clients are the various associations formed by the farmers and the individual businesses that help build regular earning opportunities by combining thousands of producers all through Africa and Latin America.

Until today, The Root capital has provided as much as $260 million in trade credit to the businesses that were earlier “missing middle” because of their size being too small for the banks or organizations to fund them and too big to raise micro-finance. The loans given by the Root capital mostly have the forward contract underlying and to a surprise, approximately, 99% of them are returned with interest.

Forte’s Root Capital has a major contribution in leaving its social impact on the growth and prosperity of the rural area of the country by lending to and investing into the small and growing businesses that helps the farmers gets a big chunk of money. In return, these farmers are able to sustain their crops together with maintaining the quality of their crops, ultimately benefiting the customers, the society, the nation as a whole.

Social Entrepreneurship and the Health Sector

Much of the world lives in underdeveloped or poor countries, where basic healthcare infrastructure is not present. Hence, it is important that social enterprises perform well in such areas, allowing basic healthcare to become possible for the citizens who cannot pay for it.

Technology has made it possible to ensure that people receive the best healthcare, with the easiest of manners. Hence, for social entrepreneurs who work in either health, education or poverty alleviation, more than 7 billion potential customers want their support. With technology, social entrepreneurs can find innovative solutions, which can be used to save lives. Major cause of deaths are preventable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart diseases. If day to day routines of citizens in a community are enhanced, it is possible to fight such diseases and prevent them.

The Hult Prize is the most prestigious amongst all Social entrepreneurs and provides seed money of almost $1 million in order to help make the plan work. In 2014, NanoHealth came forward to bring health to the masses in need. It helps manage chronic diseases in urban slums, by combing technology and human behaviour. Started by Manish Rajan in India, NanoHealth has social workers known as Saathis. They are trained and dedicated to a cluster of communities, providing basic low-cost healthcare through their product called Doc-In-a-Bag. They also provide health services by using interactive sessions for local community members.

In Mozambique, social entrepreneurs started a project to help patients remember when to take medicines and reminding them to show up at their doctor’s appointment. Hence, technology is making it possible for social entrepreneurs to work in health ventures such as providing prescriptions through mobile devices, allowing communities to use online interactive sessions to learn about chronic issues and sending barcodes on medicines to confirm original from counterfeits.

Nisha Ligon and Education Through Ubongo

Nisha Ligon has been part of the social enterprise system for some time now. A Thai-American, she has worked on education and its delivery in underdeveloped nations. Currently, her company Ubongo is helping kids in Tanzania and other parts of Africa learn math through cartoon series known as Ubongo Kids.

Nisha has been part of The Guardian, BBC, and the London Science Museum. She provided them with radio packages, podcasts and animated videos on development topics, particularly science. As per her educational background, it is well decorated. Nisha has a B.S. in Biology from Yale University and an MSc. in Science Media Production from Imperial College London, while also having a minor in Film and was an intern at the University of Dar as Salaam.

Her educational delivery success can be seen by her work with UK GCSE math and science curriculum. She was part of a team that managed to make animated learning videos for both students and teachers. From there, she thought it would be a brilliant idea to help children in Tanzania learn math and science through cartoons and animated productions. Co-Founded by her, she has a great team of writers, who work towards the best delivery methods, helping kids at home learn math at their own pace. The overall show is localized with his help of Tanzanian labor, rather than asking Western help. The group loves to portray it as something they have made in Africa for Africa. Ubongo TV and Kids has more than 1.2 million viewers in Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya. Although the show can’t solve the education issues, it provides the groundwork to help develop fundamental basics of math and science for kids. Nisha Ligon heads a team of experts that sits and works on the curriculum of 13 episodes. After they finalize ideas, they brainstorm on possible mediums and animations that can be handy. It then adds songs and melodies, cartoon characters that are appropriate to the script.

A few famous cartoon characters kids love include Mama Edge, a big green bird. A dancing frog named Da Chura, a professional monkey named Ngedere, and a rapping giraffe named Uncle T. kids love learning math with Mama Edge and it has been a complete success,