Social enterprises are needed more than ever amid Covid-19, and Asia is the perfect place for their growth
- Social enterprises, which try to meet social needs through a for-profit business model, are often at the forefront of social innovation
- The region, with its vast wealth and extreme poverty, must tap its considerable resources in philanthropy and investment funds to support innovative business ideas for wider benefit
The study, conducted in late February, revealed that the average turnover of most of the 214 companies surveyed more than halved in January and February compared with the same period last year. Nearly 20 per cent of those surveyed had no revenue at all. Education and training enterprises were the worst affected.
The chamber is calling on the government to give certified social enterprises here, numbering about 500, a handout of HK$80,000 each to help mitigate the impact from the fall in revenues brought on by the coronavirus crisis. But what are social enterprises and why do they matter?
The study is the largest data-driven analysis of early-stage social enterprises and their ecosystems in Asia. It covers six economies – Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Pakistan and Thailand – with 1.2 million social enterprises between them, and spotlights China and India, which adds an estimated 3.5 million to the total.
We define a social enterprise as an organisation that follows business principles to meet a social or environmental need through a product, service, process or distribution of profit. Take Festyle, a Hong Kong social enterprise promoting healthy eating and women’s employment by recruiting female home-based cooks to prepare healthy, ready-to-cook meals for busy city dwellers.