The Perfect Social Entrepreneurship Examples Involve Doing Business For The Benefit Of Others

By Camille Nicholson


When one thinks of social entrepreneurship examples or comes across a businessman or a businesswoman, seldom do we think of businesses as community platforms for community developments and social growth. The first thought that always enters our minds is self enrichment. We think of entrepreneurs as wealthy, high standing people in society who skip all the way to the bank to collect healthy profits each month.

This thinking is however flawed in a lot of ways as there are 2 types of businesses, business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. We shall explore social entrepreneurship more. Business entrepreneurs are in business for the financial profit that comes with running a successful business.

Social entrepreneurship are those people who go into business for the specific reason of identifying and correcting a social problem be it in their immediate community or their country at large or the society as a whole. Social entrepreneurs might make monetary profit along the lines of being in business, but their main objective is to benefit society as a whole, to improve the quality of life of those people in their societies or communities.

Though they may generate a profit in their business, it's not what they set out to do. Making money will mean nothing to the organization if the service offered does not benefit or correct and meet the need of the communities involved. Every year South Africa holds the Shoprite checkers woman of the year function.

One such example is Ms Nyeleti Mushwana who recognized that her community was plagued by poverty and she observed that Limpopo had a lot of tourist attractions, and she started her own hotel and business conferences business. Ms Mushwana hired people from her own community, educated them on how to run the hotel business and thus provided poverty alleviation for many members of the Tzaneen community.

One of the greatest and practical examples of social entrepreneurship is a company called ASHOKA. ASHOKA is a business that has dedicated itself to identify, help and provide social funding to social entrepreneurs around the world. As we speak this excellent company has assisted 2145 entrepreneurs in 73 countries of the world.

The beauty of this is that some of the ASHOKA funded entrepreneurs have gone on to develop their own social businesses and have improved some parts of the world tremendously. The HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa left a lot of children without parents, and ultimately without homes. That is why Nelson Mandela formed the Nelson Mandela children's foundation.

It is a social entity that provides a home for those children who have no one, and thus the Children's foundation provides alleviation for those kids who otherwise would have ended up being on the streets. Social entrepreneurship identifies the lack of service delivery of their communities in whatever form the lack comes in, and they go into a business that looks into delivering that services or services and thus improve their communities and societies at large. The world could do with more social entrepreneurship examples, but it's unfortunate that we don't identify the improvement of our societies as a business venture because we have all been brainwashed to identify entrepreneurship with money.




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