Social entrepeneurship

If your conscience is as important to you as your cash, then maybe you should consider becoming one of the growing band of social entrepreneurs. David […]

If your conscience is as important to you as your cash, then maybe you should consider becoming one of the growing band of social entrepreneurs. David Williams investigates

“I don’t know anybody who is an entrepreneur who said I am going to business school to get an MBA,” challenges Dr Pamela Hartigan, Director of The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. “That would be the first in a very long line of bad business mistakes. You do not go to business school or anywhere else to learn to become an entrepreneur. You either are an entrepreneur or you are not, and, if you are, you just get on with it. The fact is that, if you have a passion for something, you don’t have to get a degree to go out and do it”.

The same holds for social entrepreneurs. The term is a red herring. Social entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs just the same. The only difference is that they are focussed on creating a new product or a new way of doing things that is going to benefit the world rather than their own or their shareholders’ pockets. I always say a social entrepreneur is a cross somewhere between Richard Branson of Virgin and Mother Teresa of Calcutta; it just depends where on that spectrum you fall. Social entrepreneurs have a passion and are driven to change part of the system that isn’t working for a particular group. They don’t have the time, the inclination, or necessarily the resources to go off and do a degree that gives them permission to follow that passion”.

“If you are going to do a graduate degree, you should make sure it gives you some useful tools by pursuing subjects such as engineering, economics or healthcare. The best social entrepreneurs in the world are people who have focussed on a particular area. For example a disproportionate number of social entrepreneurs are engineers, perhaps because they are used to bringing their skills to bear in a very practical way until they fix the problem they are focussed on.”

The engineer entrepreneur

One such engineer is Harish Hande, who was 26 when he founded Selco India, a company selling, installing and servicing solar lights for poor Indian households. After a decade and a half of struggle to find the right investment partners, Selco has recently received $1.4 million in equity finance from the Good Energies Foundation and other organizations.

The idea came while Hande was a graduate engineering student at the Centre for Sustainable Energy at the University of Massachusetts. While on a trip to the Dominican Republic he saw the potential for the technology to be used in his home country. “I saw these very poor people using solar lighting,” he says. “In India, people were less poor or equally poor. And if people there were using solar, why couldn’t we?

“There were a lot of myths before we started Selco,” he says. “Poor people cannot afford technology, poor people cannot maintain technology, and you cannot run a commercial venture while trying to meet social objectives.”

While still a graduate student, he linked up with a charity dedicated to the promotion of solar power in developing countries. But Hande soon realised that it wasn’t just providing the lights that mattered; it was financing their purchase and servicing them when they were installed, something a company could do better than a not-for-profit. To this end, he set up Selco. As with most forms of renewable energy, the sticking point for customers was the upfront cost of installation, and it took him a long time to persuade local banks and cooperatives to create niche financial products that would allow individuals and families to borrow money to enable them to purchase the lights. “This can succeed only if you have doorstep service and doorstep financing,” he explains.

Selco has now sold lights to around 100,000 customers and, with the new funding, the company anticipates being able to sell to 200,000 more in the next four years. Hande’s key lesson is this. “Irrespective of whether you want money, you should have control of the company for the sake of the mission,” he says. “No matter how desperate you are for money, never take it from someone whose mission is not aligned with your own.”

The humanitarian

A different type of social entrepreneurship story is told by Sasha Chanoff, Founder and Executive Director of Mapendo International, a not-for-profit organization which identifies and resettles those refugees who are in the most extreme danger. After ten years working in the field for other humanitarian organizations, he felt he needed to return to grad school to gain the perspective and contacts necessary to set up on his own.

“Social entrepreneur is a term that is used quite a lot these days and as I have created an organization I guess I do define myself as one,” he says. “But for me personally, it has been a very organic process. When I started working with refugees just out of my undergraduate liberal-arts degree, I had a very specific job in that my role was to help refugees find employment. All the time, however, I was trying to think of things I could do outside that job to help them. I would always try to tune in to the things about the people that weren’t being addressed. Then, when I went to Africa to work, I found I was really concentrating on the most vulnerable refugees, those whose needs were not being addressed by the existing humanitarian aid structure. Up until the point I created Mapendo, I was always doing little side projects, taking on additional responsibilities or getting involved in issues that I thought needed to be solved. Mapendo has become the solution to the problems I was thinking about all that time, but I didn’t think ten years ago I would establish Mapendo specifically. I just knew I was going to establish some kind of organization at some point.”

When Chanoff felt he was ready, he decided to return to full-time education and find a program that prepared him for the challenges of setting up his own organization. He chose a Masters in Humanitarian Assistance from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy, a joint degree program through the Tufts Feinstein International Famine Centre. “In terms of both theory and contacts the program gave me a very significant base from which to launch an organization while simultaneously credentialising me in the appropriate way”.

These two case studies make it clear that there is not necessarily a relationship between business schools and social entrepreneurship. If you want to be a social entrepreneur, you will, like any entrepreneur, do it anyway.

Notes

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