Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East Toward Sustainable Development for the Next Generation
The report presents recommendations for policymakers in the U.S. and the Middle East, private sector leaders, international donors, social investor organizations, and educational institutions. Tarik Yousef, Rick Little, and Samantha Constant write in the foreword to the report:
"[We] believe that successful models encompassing the best practices of both private business and public social development activities will contribute significantly to achieving responsible economic growth in the region. Until now there has been no comprehensive attempt to delineate the extent of social entrepreneurship in the Middle East and to identify methods to encourage successful innovations at both local and regional levels. This report aims to start filling this gap and to launch a public discussion of what policies and practices can better enable the most promising social enterprises to flourish, with a focus on those led by or serving young people."
Despite the promise of an increasingly educated population of young people, the Middle East’s “youth bulge” generates pressure on education systems, labor markets, health care, natural resources and infrastructure. In this context, and with constrained public and private resources, traditional development frameworks in the Middle East are proving inadequate and are in need of transformation. Within the complex ecosystem of domestic governments, international donors, private businesses and individual philanthropists, the emerging model of social entrepreneurship offers potential as being one model to address the multi-sectoral challenges young people face in the Middle East.
This report draws on existing literature to focus on four central principles of social entrepreneurship:
- Achievement of positive social impact: Social entrepreneurship responds to communities that have been marginalized or excluded by existing market actors and non-market institutions;
- Non-conventional thinking: Social entrepreneurship aims for what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” a revolutionary transformation of a pattern of production which is often associated with entrepreneurship at large but, in the case of social entrepreneurship, is applied to social challenges;
- Use of sustainable methods: Social entrepreneurship must include a strategy for achieving fi nancial sustainability, such as earning income; and,
- Innovation that can be adapted and “scaled up” beyond the local context: It is by pioneering ideas that can be applied
at a larger scale that social entrepreneurship is able to contribute to systemic and path-breaking change.
- (Document) 25th Apr 2010
