Social Entrepreneurs: Doing Sustainable Development - Ashoka

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Top: Jumping rope at an
after-school program in
South Africa; Middle:
Waste collectors in
Mumbai; Bottom: Fair
Trade products, a niche
market for many Ashoka
Fellows
More investment or fuel will incubate and grow social entrepreneurial innovations.
Policy changes that internalize external costs and benefits will buttress
existing social entrepreneurial efforts and unearth new opportunities
for social entrepreneurs to exploit. Better information and the capacity to
use this data intelligently will allow social entrepreneurs to make smarter
decisions. Similarly, better cooperation and coordination both among social
entrepreneurs and across sectors will improve impact at a low cost. Finally,
increased visibility will encourage new entrants that will, in turn, lead to more
and more effective social entrepreneurial efforts globally.
Rio: its successes and its discontents
Amid much fanfare, the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development
in Rio boosted the environment's profile and elevated the term "sustainable
development" into common parlance. Since then, Rio's immediate legacy
has been strong on PR and institutional development, but weak on results.
Inspect the deliverables from Rio and the reality on the ground. Though the
Convention on Biological Diversity represents a significant step forward in
rhetoric, rates of extinction remain at 100 to 1,000 times the natural background
rate while community rights to these biological resources remain at
issue. Similarly with climate change, despite the tremendous expenditure of
diplomatic effort on the Kyoto Protocol, global emissions of carbon dioxide
increased by more than 9% over the last decade and the Protocol itself has
been left to flounder, handicapped by the non-participation of the world's
most prolific polluter.
The development dimension looks similarly bleak. Even with recent
improvements, approximately 1.3 billion people, one quarter of the world's
population, still live on under $1 a day, and 14% of the world's children still
do not receive a primary education.
The hope is that Jo'burg will focus on implementation and that its legacy will
actually be sustainable development-as opposed to merely image and institutional
development-measured in terms of increased equity and a cleaner
environment.
Now we need results -- so how do we get there?
The fashionable strategies to move forward on sustainable development
emerging before Jo'burg include mechanisms to ensure corporate accountability,
increased overseas development aid, and partnerships among businesses,
governments, and NGOs. Certainly these tacks are promising and
worth pushing forward, but there is an essential and often overlooked set of
actors with unique skills and dispositions that is key to the success of any of
these strategies-actors who will produce results whether working in a relatively
enabling or disabling environment.
Much of the phenomenal growth in economic activity over the past 300 years
can be linked to a personality type, the entrepreneur, innovating, adapting,