Positive Contributions to Society through Social Entrepreneurship and Partnerships
Social entrepreneurship is pioneering and inspirational. Treating beneficiaries as customers and collaborating with other stakeholders in society - the government, traditional charities and responsible corporations – are pivotal to scale-up new innovations and models that have proved successful to achieve social impact, writes Adjunct Associate Professor Marie ROSENCRANTZ, Department of Management, HKUST Business School. She teaches a course that allows students to experience social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy, and seeks to help build the social impact ecosystem in Hong Kong and beyond.
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Despite progress made over the last decades with respect to poverty reduction, notably in China, there are still large unmet social needs and massive efforts required to reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More than 700 million people, or ten per cent of the world population, still live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than US$1.90 per day. Hundreds of millions of people lack access to basic necessities like sanitation, safe drinking water, electricity and banking services. Lack of access to services and infrastructure has wider negative implications for health, education and gender equality, as well as the ability of the poor to improve their own lives and lift themselves and their families out of poverty.
While Hong Kong is an affluent global center for finance and commerce, it has a higher income gap between the rich and the poor than most advanced economies. 1.3 million of the 7.2 million people in Hong Kong live in poverty, with a disproportionate number of the poor being elderly and almost twenty per cent children.
To address these pressing social needs, government programs, charitable organizations and responsible corporations all have important roles to play. Alongside more traditional actors, a dynamic movement of social entrepreneurs has emerged, who address social and environmental issues in business-like and innovative ways. Social entrepreneurs often start their ventures driven by a strong personal passion to address a social need. However, to reach scale, social entrepreneurs need the support of others, often including some partly or fully subsidized funding, at least during the early days of their social ventures.
Venture philanthropists, like venture capitalists, extend not only seed funding for social entrepreneurs, but also support social enterprises in other ways, including through their often extensive networks and technical / financial know-how. Government agencies and corporations can learn from and partner with social entrepreneurs, and can help take their work to scale.
Cross-sector collaboration to nurture social minds
