(With Helen Ng and Misbah Naqvi)
Nicole Wallace’s recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurs Seek New Investments to Reach a ‘Tipping Point’, prompted some e-mail discussion here in the Acumen New York office as well as in our Karachi office. Naturally, we were pleased to see one of our investees – Kashf Foundation’s Roshaneh Zafar – quoted. We were also glad to see mainstream coverage of the challenges facing our sector.
In her article, Wallace focuses in on the need for social entrepreneurs to reach a tipping point, and to begin scaling up their operations and, as such, their impact. This is something we think about nearly every day at Acumen Fund: does this company have the potential to reach 1 million BoP customers? Money is an issue, as KickStart’s Martin Fisher points out in the article. So too is finding the right corporate partner. We also see talent – recruiting, training and retaining good employees – as a key bottleneck.
Will social entrepreneurship reach a tipping point? It depends on the money, the partners and the people – among other things. We applaud Nicole Wallace for focusing on some of the real challenges facing our sector, and hope that this article will prompt even more discussion of how we can move ahead using business strategies to address poverty.
It strikes me that the determinant of scaling for social enterprises is more than money. It might equally have to do with the business model and the extent to which it succeeds in strategically meeting the unmet social needs. Not all social enterprises are well enough conceived that they can scale. so more attention to design of the enterprise and its business model in the first place–and, I would say–and to the key challenges of the sector and country in which it intends to grow might be as important as investment.
Reply to Al Hammond