The challenge for social entrepreneurs in most third-world countries is two-fold. First, there is the question of how to help grow the local economy and protect the environment by raising a new generation of wealth creators at home, rather than just jobseekers abroad. And social entrepreneurship is the place where charity, sustainability, entrepreneurship, idealism, and realism intersect. Secondly, how to become producers of home-grown, ethical, quality made-at-home brands using local raw materials and skills, instead of having people consume expensive foreign brands or cheap, even dangerous contaminated imported goods.
Other challenges include:
1. How to use the social entrepreneurship platform to attract and support business, finance, management, science, and design graduates from top universities, instead of losing them to better paying opportunities overseas. Emerging countries need the best and the brightest to stay in-country and develop for-profit social enterprises that will be pro-poor, pro-environment, and pro-country
2. How to get businesses to help social entrepreneurs incubate and grow their social enterprises and see them as wise investments. Social entrepreneurs need corporations to understand that doing good for the poor and for nature makes good business sense for everyone.
3. How to gain government support for social entrepreneurs through investment, tax, and subsidy incentives, farm to market roads, irrigation, and post-harvest facilities, training, and technology, in partnership with farmers and skilled workers.
4. How to create a convergence of the public and private, the rich and the poor, so as to become co-collaborators in creating and shared abundance for the greater good.
5. How to get the children of the rich in cities to come to understand that the land and the poor in rural areas can be income generators.
Gawad Kalinga founder Antonio “Tony” Meloto drew insights from his experiences under Gawad Kalinga (GK) as a social enterprise when he wrote the paper, “Social Innovation and Inclusion for Sustainable Growth,” published in Book 2 of the CRC-published book set “Social Enterprise: Work that Uplifts Human Life” (edited by Veronica Esposo Ramirez.) Book two of the four-book set, presents papers written by professionals who have spent many years in cooperative work.
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