Social Entrepreneurship: Measuring Impact and Reaching Scale

Ehaab Abdou

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Video Transcription:

In business entrepreneurship we are looking, basically, at one bottom line which is the profit, and this is what corporations are mostly driven by…[P]otentially, they might have as a byproduct or as an additional aspect of the business some social responsibility work. The difference between that and social enterprise is that [with] a social entrepreneur, or a social enterprise when it is being first set up, the main driving goal behind its being set up or established is a social agenda: a social impact that it wants to address in the community, a cause, or socioeconomic development challenge. But it has a business model that brings in revenue, and possibly some profit as well, that helps it be sustainable and that helps it scale up. I think this is the main difference, having one bottom line with for-profit, pure business entrepreneurs versus a triple bottom line [where] at the end of the year you are not only looking at your profits but you are also looking at your socioeconomic and environmental impacts.

…How do you monetize and how do you quantify social impact? [This is] especially more challenging when it comes to social investment, because you want to put this on paper, you want to have it as a social return on investment, and you want to have a number for these women that you have empowered or this village that you have helped have better health or better education. How do you put a dollar value to that?”

The debate has been that social innovation, or social entrepreneurship, is good and does provide an alternative, but it remains on a smaller scale, not really addressing the macro issues. I would tend to say that this is only true if different sectors are not working together with these innovations: in the beginning supporting them and creating the healthy environment that they could flourish…and then the next level is to help these initiatives and innovations be adopted on a national scale…

To be able to reach this critical mass and this size you need conducive regulations and laws that enable you to mobilize funds; you need to have the right social capital markets in place that would invest with you so you can scale up nationally or regionally, whichever region you are working in; and then you want also a conducive, healthy relationship with policy makers who would be willing to listen to these innovations and adopt them and institutionalize them on the policy level.