Do Social Entrepreneurs Need to Speak In Terms of Human Rights?
Published March 01, 2009 @ 05:42AM PT
Dr. Paul Farmer exams AIDS patient Thelemaque Innocent in Haiti (via St. Petersburg Times)
Watching the Skoll Foundation's recent short video overview of social entrepreneurship, I was struck anew by the story of Muhammad Yunus' $27 loan that launched what would become known as "microfinance." What struck me, however, was not the "innovation" of the business model, but instead the fact that that loan was an affirmation of a human right - the right to credit.
In our society, it has been easy to think of credit simply as a little card that lets you buy more things with money you don't have. But as the economic crisis has reminded us so dramatically, credit is at its best, a tool for enabling people to pursue a better future. What Yunus did was reject the assumption that poor people are unworthy of our trust or incapable of making smart financial decisions, and trade it in for an assumption that they too deserved, indeed had the right, to the same opportunity.
This reminds me of the opening of Paul Farmer's "Loyalist Critique" at the Skoll World Forum last year, a speech I just can't seem to get enough of quoting. In the speech, Farmer shares the mixed emotions he felt when he was notified that he was to be awarded a Skoll Award. On the one hand, of course, he was honored and excited about the support of his work at Partners in Health. But on the other hand, he was dismayed.
What exactly is a social entrepreneur? ... Part of me winced when I acknowledged that yes, we live in an era in which simply seeking to provide high quality medical care to the world's poorest is considered innovative and entrepreneurial... Shouldn't we have offered such services to those who need them long, long ago? Shouldn't we have designed systems to get around or solve the health problems faced by the worlds bottom billion?
What Farmer was referring to was human rights. Indeed, in the climax of his speech he went on to say:
We need to be aware that each of the terms and concepts and tools we’ve developed can be used to deny the destitute access to goods and services that sometimes should be rights, not commodities. Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay some sort of users fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?
I wonder in how many cases the "innovation" of a social entrepreneurs comes down to rejiggering business models to better distribute at scale the goods or services to which all people have rights? If everyone has a right to high-quality healthcare, how do we provide that in the absence of expenses pharmaceuticals and pristine hospitals? If everyone has a right to quality education, how do we deliver that in the face of variable materials and overworked teachers?
And if it is the case that so much of the work of social entrepreneurs stems from human rights denied, why don't we speak in those terms more often? Why don't we explore what this implies for our the way we rethink the structures that dominate our society? Is seems to me that this may be the essential context for talking about "scaling" our innovation.
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Comments (11)
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Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.
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Nice post. This connected a bunch of things for me. I really like your formulation that social entrepreneurs are working on the margins of our economy to make markets work better by "regiggering business models" to deliver goods and services where they had not reached before.
As an entrepreneur, that really resonates with me. That is precisely what a start-up does.
Posted by Stephen Quatrano on 03/01/2009 @ 08:07AM PT
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This is an endless debate on my campus where the public service crowd shuns social entrepreneurship. The world entrepreneurship is embedded in a histories of both incredible global growth and prosperity as well as economic exploitaiton. In this sense, Farmer's recoil to the term comes to no suprise. But isn't it a shame when we must quible over definition rather than ask ourselves simply "are we doing good"? To a degree, I think this is what Farmer is getting at.
Posted by Charles Harding on 03/01/2009 @ 08:23PM PT
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I agree with Charles.
"Social entrepreneur" is a particularly loaded word, and is so-over used these days it's hard to know what it really means.
I think it's for other people to place the labels - good work is good work, whatever it's called.
Ken
Posted by Ken Banks on 03/02/2009 @ 03:56AM PT
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Actually, the term is quite precise and therefore useful. When the mission of an organization is only framed in legal or moral terms, you are not really using the forces in the marketplace that drive adoption of new ideas and growth in the production of goods and services. You are limited by rather conventional fundraising and political processes. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; it's just an observation.
Corporations, on the other hand, rely on missions that are purely economic. Corporations can, should and often do produce good things for society: "good work" as it were. But in governance terms, this is not the main point, a desierable and beneficial side effect.
The social entrepreneur is a hybrid. The mission must be framed in both economic AND social terms. Economic forces align with moral ones, as they did for Yunus. He raised money on private capital markets and grew 100's or even 1000's of times faster than conventional fundraising would have permitted. This is a very specific idea, a very specific term.
It's also not as easy as it looks. Everyone can see what Yunus did AFTER he achieved it. But to imagine it when it does not exist is another matter. Even to support it and join an idea like his when it is a half-finished picture can be very, very difficult.
Posted by Stephen Quatrano on 03/02/2009 @ 06:05AM PT
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I agree with everyone in this post. I'm usually the first one to get bored with any term that seems to exist more to enable funding decisions than to produce better knowledge or work, which is a big piece of my skepticism with our field.
That said, I do think we're in a moment of structural philosophical reevaluation where it's not enough - on its own - to say good work is good work, I don't think.
Capitalism as it is is broken. Something needs to change fundamentally, and that fundamental change seems to me to be around the limits we place. Limits to the ways we exploit for profit maximization; limits to the ways that *only* market forces are allowed to distribute vital goods and services.
Human rights is one plausible answer for beginning to firm up the margins of those limits and understand what we are, and what we are not, as a society and a global economy, willing to tolerate.
If, as I'm spectulating above, these margins where human rights trump an unadulterated profit motive are really the domain of social entrepreneurs, we need to speak in those terms.
The implications are not just for our work and certainly not for branding but for the way in which we impact a larger cultural conversation.
Posted by Nathaniel Whittemore on 03/02/2009 @ 07:23AM PT
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Human rights need to be codified and protected in law to limit what corporations do. Corporations complain about limitations; however, what they care about is a level playing field and predicatbility. If we signal that we are serious about protecting human rights in law and then enforcing the law, corporations will respond. We've become so enamoured with markets that we have forgotten that economies are always POLITICAL economies. The interests of the state, society, and PEOPLE have always trumped pure capitalism; we have just temporarily forgotten this idea.
Posted by Stephen Quatrano on 03/02/2009 @ 07:42AM PT
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Yes and yes and thrice yes. Farmer's speech was the standout at Skoll, because a) it focused on rights and b) it pointed out that these "beneficiaries" or "users" or "clients" were also potential social entrepreneurs themselves...
Posted by Nick Temple on 03/03/2009 @ 03:54AM PT
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I agree with most of what has been posted, but I'm mostly aligned with the comments shared by Nick, Nathaniel and Stephen. As a social worker, I have always struggled with the public perception that all my profession does is help poor disadvantaged people and "do good work." I have always been a stronger champion for the social work mission of social change and seeing certain services as human rights such as education, healthcare, housing, etc. I have recently stumbled upon the concept of social entrepreneurship and I agree with Stephen that it seems to be very specific. Its about using business concepts and models with the goal of addressing a social issue. As human services become more and more dependent on government dollars and foundation grants that often steer these organizations away from their true missions, I can't help but wonder if social workers can learn a few things about using the market to benefit those that are marginalized by society. Maybe then we would stop using band-aid solutions for deeper social issues that require a completely new way of doing things.
Posted by Amy Eusebio on 03/06/2009 @ 11:43AM PT
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Give someone a fish and they eat for a day, teach them how to fish and they eat for the rest of their lives.
This is old school.
Those micro loans sound interesting, a group with resources could act like a bank in this activity.
If I understand correctly if one starts being successful, having an extra pot, some despot (bad "authority" - local hoodlum or government) will take it from them. So give a loan to someone, they start getting ahead and then along comes someone with a gun and it is gone. One would have to protect the investment...
On the flip side any success attracts those that are self motivated - if one were to establish a "bank" and it becomes successful the risk of infection increases. We are seeing this in our current business models.
Posted by jowey styxx on 03/06/2009 @ 03:39PM PT
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The idea of social entrepreneurship started out as a social justice idea. It was a way to use the marketplace to uplift people and improve their standards of living.
It has only been in the last few years as the capitalist marketplace has seen the growth of interest amongst the public for this idea and its PROFITABILITY that other entities which may not have a social justice background have gotten involved with this movement and, to some degree, have taken it over & twisted it to fit their own personal agendas.
We, as social justice advocates, are attempting to take the concept of social entrepreneurship back to its original purpose, which is to uplift the standards of living for those at the bottom of society.
For the sake of the world's poor, I hope that we're successful.
All the Best, debbie :)
www.mpwn-uganda.org
Posted by Debbie Kreuser on 03/07/2009 @ 08:14AM PT
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"Ingestion Rights" are the unclaimed Human Right. If we embraced it, we could end pollution & the slaughter over turf in Mexico.
Posted by Grant Hawkins on 03/08/2009 @ 02:27PM PT
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