“My experience of working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.”
The Wikipedia defines social entrepreneurship as “Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.”
The world is seeing a huge opportunity of social entrepreneurship in India. It’s not because of Indian economy is booming and thus making the chances of success of any entrepreneurship venture as gold. But quite the contrary, the social problems are in abundance in our country and millions of social changes are needed which could make the social entrepreneurship a real success.
You don’t often get the chance to discuss such topic with elites and pundits of business and economy. Last evening I was graced with such opportunity to discuss the real nuts and bolts of this evolving phase of business. After our discussions, I found myself really convinced that the future of social entrepreneurship is real bright in India because of following few reasons.
Firstly, the vast and deep rooted social problems in India provide a good market potential for social changes and hence social entrepreneurship. Whether, its illiteracy, rural health, rural credit system or poor education system, these all loose nuts and bolts of this biggest democracy provides an opportunity for optimist entrepreneurs out there in market. The only challenge is, coming up with a strong business model.
In last few weeks, I came across such ventures that have already started working in this direction and have really pioneering in their respective areas. Rakesh Dubey’s Sonata Finance and Manab Chakraborty’s Mimo Finance are the ventures to name a few.
Secondly, there has been phenomenal shift in the thinking of the junta about the purpose of such ventures. They have started to understand that making modest profit out of such opportunities is not at all evil. Indeed, there are well know contemporary like Muhammad Yunus who feel that such ventures should be nonprofit but on the other hand there are social capitalist like Bill Gates who advocates for making modest profit out of such opportunities (refer http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2008/01-24WEFDavos.mspx for detail).
But if we leave the rightness and wrongness of this development and just look at the impact of these ventures on society, it’s phenomenal. The rural credit which was not only difficult to get but also complicated to handle for India rural junta, is becoming really easy and flexible now. The banks, which used to shy away from such lending, have also started seeing future in it (“It’s not people who aren’t credit worthy. It’s banks that aren’t people worthy” -Muhammad Yunus ). Proactive ventures like this are making very strong social impacts.
In conclusion, area like micro financing, rural health, retail supply chain gap (proving better bargain for crop to farmers) provides a fabulous entrepreneurial opportunity for the young generation to bridge the gap between the have and have not’s and make a modest profit at the same time.
Moreover remember that all that is needed for evil to triumph is good people to do nothing.
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