Social
entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify
and bring about potentially transformative societal improvements. Ventures in
this realm are usually intended to benefit economically marginalized segments
of society that can’t transform their prospects without help. But the endeavors
should be financially sustainable, because there’s no guarantee that subsidies
from taxpayers or charitable givers will continue indefinitely. Grameen Bank is
a famous example of a social venture that met both goals. In studying the
winners of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the authors found that
they all focus on changing two features of an existing system: the economic
actors involved and the enabling technology applied. For example, the
children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi realized that reaching ethically
concerned consumers through Rugmark (now GoodWeave International) could help
foil exploitative labor brokers in India’s carpet-weaving industry. And through
the Kiva platform, Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley enabled small-scale
lenders in wealthy countries to lend to small-scale borrowers in poor
countries. Today GoodWeave operates globally, and Kiva is on track to
facilitate more than $1 billion in microloans within the next couple of years.
INSET: A New Model for Public Projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]