The main focus of his talk was the Global Fund and the challenges he has seen it face over the past eleven years, while running Aidspan.

The Global Fund was set up in 2002, partly in response to Kofi Annan’s statement that there was a need for a “war chest” of seven to ten  billion dollars for developing countries to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

Bernard Rivers (c) Cambridge News

Eleven years later, the fight against these diseases is still necessary and relevant. At present there are about 35 million people living with HIV, the majority of whom do not yet know they have the disease. 1 million people die of tuberculosis every year and half a million more die of malaria, the majority of them children.

Rivers pithily describes the Global Fund’s starting mission as “raise it, spend it, prove it”. It placed a great emphasis on rigorous audit, transparency and performance-based funding. The Global Fund also stressed that countries which received funding be able to manage how the money was spent, by means of a committee composed of government and non-governmental members.

It was the unique combination of these features, Rivers said, that attracted him to work alongside the Global Fund in the first place: “Every one of these features is possessed in some form by other major grant-making organisations, but there is no other multi-billion dollar grant-making organisation that possesses all of them.”

He established Aidspan in 2002, after attracting attention from funders by publishing the Global Fund Observer, a newsletter containing news, analysis and commentary on the Global Fund. Aidspan’s Global Fund Observer also publishes guides for organisations to help them apply for Global Fund money.

Rivers was clear on his overall mission for the organisation from the start: “our approach to Aidspan was this: 8.6 million lives saved by the Global Fund over a decade or so. Could the Global Fund be one percent more effective? One percent more efficient? Sure. Could it aspire to pushing and helping the Global Fund in various ways to be one percent more effective? We can aspire to that. What is one percent of 8.6 million lives? It is 86,000 people. Is this work worth doing?  Yes it is.”

In the 11 years it has been operational, the Global Fund has saved almost 9 million lives, an “amazing success” by anyone’s standards. It has achieved this by raising 25 billion dollars, dispersing roughly three billion per year to projects that form 82% of global financing for TB, 50% of global financing for Malaria and 21% of global financing for AIDS.

However, the Global Fund has also had its fair share of challenges.  Aside from bureaucratic and management problems, Rivers explained that the Global Fund experienced its hardest period in 2011, when their principles of transparency and vigorous audit came into conflict.

After doing their own investigations they found that threecountries in west Africa, of the 150 that receive Global Fund money, were implicated in fraud. True to their values of transparency, the Global Fund published the report on the internet—“warts and all”. This provided the Associated Press with an excuse to lead with the headline, ‘Fraud Plagues the Global Fund’, which sparked nervousness among both donors and recipients of Global Fund money.

However, the Global Fund weathered the storm, and is now looking to raise 15 billion dollars to fund further projects over the next three years.

Although he has recently retired as Head of Aidspan, Rivers was vocal in his viewpoint of what should come next for the Global Fund:“In the longer term, they must shift their emphasis from that ‘cashier demanding receipts’ to an ‘investor demanding results’. Ultimately the Global Fund’s role should not be to pay for activities that have been performed, but to pay for results achieved.”

Many audience members had dashed to the Humanitarian Centre’s Annual Lecture from another global health lecture, and were keen to follow up Rivers’ talk with questions on the wider impact of the Global Fund, and development challenges related to the diseases it tackles and others.

The subsequent drinks reception was also lively, with representatives from Humanitarian Centre member organisations and non-members alike eager to discuss what they had just heard.

One attendee commented: “What I like about talks like this, is that they give you a perspective on the general development sector. The audience questions were very interesting too; it makes you think, if the Global Fund hadn’t been there, would that money just have amalgamated to do anything or would it have gone to other places?

Of course it’s a big competition out there to get funding and distribute it, and I did think the Global Fund seemed a bit restrictive. I also thought it was a good question to ask about diabetes, and about other diseases the Global Fund doesn’t cover.

But what was great was that we had an expert who could really answer the questions well.”

To find out more about Aidspan, or to sign up to their newsletter, visit www.aidspan.org .

Social enterprise is a term we increasingly come across, in business, charities, amongst students and in wider society. On first encountering the term, for many it may conjure a vague concept of ‘good’ business. For Paula Melendez, the president of Beyond Profit, the University of Cambridge’s student social enterprise society, meeting people who are confused about the term is an everyday occurrence. “The interest in social enterprise is growing [in Cambridge]”. But while “a lot of people have heard the term and think it’s the new catchphrase…many don’t actually know what it is”.

This gap in public knowledge is in many ways an opportunity. There is a curiosity around the topic, which those in social enterprise are eager to encourage: “When people find out about social enterprise, that’s actually the exciting part … [they think], ‘Oh wow, this is what I want to do, this combines the environmental focus and the social focus with the business edge’”.

“I am passionate about social enterprise because…”

Paula acknowledges that as an emerging concept, a concrete definition of social enterprise is yet to materialise, but “it’s been increasingly defined in the past few years because legal structures to set up social enterprises have started to be put in place”.

Paula Melendez is a second year history student at Kings College, Cambridge University and the current president of Beyond Profit.

As a standard definition, she points to socialenterprise.org, the main social enterprise umbrella in the UK, which states that a social enterprise “is basically a business with a social or environmental purpose…. As a student society, that’s the definition we use to get the attention of students.

“But we also try to show that there’s a whole range of activities that can be considered as in the realm of social enterprise…all the way from a company with a big department in corporate social responsibility, to something like The Big Issue”. This range is one of the key advantages of social enterprise: “you have to rein people in with something specific … but the great thing about it is actually that it’s such a wide field”.

The conceptualisation of social enterprise may be relatively new to us, but the practice is not. As Paula says, “the great thing about social enterprise is that it can be quite an intuitive thing, and that’s why it has potential for a lot of people…you can make it as big or as small as you want”. The practice of social enterprise is spread across the world and world history: “you can see examples of social enterprise everywhere, even though it’s been very much conceptualised within the Western world”.

Paula feels the benefits and sustainability of social enterprise are clearly highlighted in contrast to charities: “one of the problems of charities is that they don’t necessarily have to be efficient. They rely on fundraising and often have a wide scope in choosing what to do with it.  That’s why I think social enterprises are very likely to thrive – if you’re running a business it is in your interest to be efficient … [if] you’re doing things in an efficient, sustainable manner, then your impact is not just going to dry up”.

Beyond Profit’s role in fostering social entrepreneurship

Beyond Profit is part of a growing trend of similar student groups and organisations across the UK. Simon Denny, social enterprise development director at Northampton University, says: “The growing opportunities for the social enterprise sector demand a response from universities which is being met… Nearly all UK universities have initiatives that provide educational and practical opportunities to get involved in social enterprise.”[1]

Examples of university support for student social enterprise movements include Student Hubs (‘connecting students with causes’), the Social Enterprise Network of universities run by the University of Plymouth, and Northampton University’s £1bn University Challenge, which challenges UK universities to spend at least £1 billion of the £7 billion they currently spend on procuring goods and services annually on social enterprise suppliers.

Beyond Profit recently received the Social Enterprise Society of the Year Award from the National Association for College and University Entrepreneurs (NACUE). This means that Beyond Profit’s work is being recognized at a national level.

Beyond Profit is relatively new, set up by Alex Handy three years ago, with “the idea to have a society that would raise awareness of and promote social enterprise to under graduate students, post graduate students, the University and beyond—a society that would show that ‘social enterprises have the possibility of doing good while making money’ – this is the motto of Beyond Profit.”

In its three-year history it has offered two streams; a careers stream (“social enterprise in different areas – microfinance, education, international development, sustainable development”, involving four events a year with invited panels and speakers) and an enterprise stream. The enterprise stream this year ran ‘Meet the Social Entrepreneur’ events (talks by well-established social entrepreneurs, including Tom Rippin from On Purpose, and Cliff Prior, founder of UnLtd) and ‘Be the Social Entrepreneur’ events (talks by younger social entrepreneurs who have just set up their initiatives and to whom students can relate).

On top of this, the society offers an annual lecture, in the past featuring John Bird from The Big Issue, and Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco.

Looking at Beyond Profit now, Paula suggests that “we have a lot of potential for growth, and we’re definitely here to stay”.

What makes a social entrepreneur?

A recurrent theme within social enterprise discourse relates to the nature of social entrepreneurs. Are there certain characteristics and motivations which distinguish social entrepreneurs and enable them to combine for-profit skills and a social orientation in one person?

According to a 2004 survey[2], social entrepreneurs tend to be “older, employed, and on higher incomes than mainstream entrepreneurs”. However, they are also to be found in “disadvantaged groups such as those on low incomes or unemployed”. In fact, females and ethnic minorities are more likely to be social entrepreneurs than mainstream entrepreneurs.

The survey results may raise more questions than they answer. Alternative views of social entrepreneurs are more definitive regarding their characteristics: social entrepreneurs are simply “extraordinarily innovative, deploying models that seem to derive results out of thin air”[3]. This characterisation resonates with the ‘hero’genre in social entrepreneurship, i.e. social entrepreneurs are heroes ‘kicking down barriers and driving social change’.

Finally, there is a view which argues that most social enterprises are not the outcome of a single charismatic individual, but of ideas generated and propagated by groups and networks – the focus on the individual entrepreneur is misplaced. The commercial entrepreneur literature initially focused on the ‘hero’ entrepreneur. Subsequently it has shifted towards the procedural aspect of enterprise, because research failed to confirm the existence of distinguishing characteristics between entrepreneurs  and non-entrepreneurs. Will the social enterprise literature mirror this shift?

Based on her experience of working with budding social entrepreneurs, Paula thinks that their characteristics are as diverse as their fields of operation: “you can be a social entrepreneur in many different careers…always looking to achieve a social benefit even though you haven’t [necessarily] set up your own social enterprise”.

“But there is one characteristic that all social entrepreneurs have in common – they are very, very passionate”. Where others see problems they see opportunities. More important than a dedication to a specific area, such as education, is the “commitment to making a difference. They are looking for an outlet to catalyse their passion and drive – social enterprise can be that outlet”.

Furthermore, even for those driven by the social outcomes, “social entrepreneurs have to be very conscious of the business aspect”, which Paula maintains is critical to success.

Beyond Profit’s well-received Think Tank programme helped Cambridge students to offer ‘consultancy services’ and their own ideas to establish social enterprises such as Healthy Planet. Does this suggest that certain characteristics of university students give them a unique perspective on social enterprise?

Paula identifies being “passionate, opinionated and self-confident” as a set of characteristics which are “special to students in general, and special to students in Cambridge. Even more than being students…it is about the generation that we are in. We are much more cosmopolitan and therefore aware of things going on outside of our backyard” – an awareness which is central to social entrepreneurship.

Barriers and challenges in expanding the pool of social entrepreneurs

In the past “if you weren’t an English teacher, a doctor, a policy maker, an economist or a dam builder, careers [in doing good] seemed somewhat limited”[4]. But with the rise of social enterprise (and other options) even financial investors, by investing in social enterprises or starting not-for-profit consultancies, can increasingly ‘do good’.

Against this background, is the conception of ‘doing good’ increasingly seen as an option open to every individual? Or, does the conundrum of ‘doing business’ vs. ‘doing good’ continue to constrain the expansion of social entrepreneurship?

Paula sees the perceived conflict between ‘altruistic’ and ‘profit’ motives as remaining a challenge. “We are still clearly falling short of having socially orientated students understand the social and environmental benefits of enterprises even if they are making money…I think that’s where the challenge lies – showing people that these two things can work together”.

This barrier may be most pronounced for humanities students, who Paula sees as often being “put off” by the business aspect of social enterprise. The result is a bias in favour of business students, in whose departments 75% of social enterprise courses reside. Only 1% of courses reside in social service departments[5].

“Enterprise in Cambridge is under-exploited from the humanities perspective. Most of the enterprise societies attract engineers, scientists, maybe a few economists, but very few art students”. Humanities students continue to see Oxfam, Unicef and the WHO as the “holy grail of doing good”. While Paula stresses that this is in itself an admirable goal, she suggests that in many cases students simply “don’t know about other possibilities”, such as social enterprise.

Beyond Profit as an organisation is committed to expanding the pool of entrepreneurs – its committee itself a mix of ages and experiences. But how do they overcome the barriers? Paula highlights the Careers Stream and joint events with other student societies (such as a recent event with the Cambridge Education Society) as effective ways of capturing a broader range of people.

Transforming theory and interest into practice

Herron et al.[6] explain that “the set of behavioural events that leads persons to become entrepreneurs presumably takes place over long portions of their lifetime”. How then can Beyond Profit encourage entrepreneurship amongst students in their short time at university and ensure that students actually transform the theory of social enterprise into practice?

Paula, who herself is in the early stages of setting up a social enterprise, hopes that students might set up enterprises within their time at Cambridge. But she acknowledges that “Cambridge is a very academic place – it would be extremely unlikely that you would be told about social enterprise in your lectures…It’s something that people have to take a personal interest in to discover what it is”. Although she stresses the importance of Beyond Profit’s primary aims of striving to raise awareness and continuing to build interest in social enterprise, she also sees their potential to be a “platform of support for actual social entrepreneurs”.

Paul Graham, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, wrote in a recent essay that “entrepreneurship is something you learn best by doing …the examples of the most successful founders make that clear”.[7] In line with this, Beyond Profit’s 2013 Think Tank fellowship will offer term long consultancy practices, where groups of students will come up with concrete and substantial reports which could potentially be developed into policy recommendations.

Beyond Profit also runs a Business Course, equipping interested people with practical skills through a series of 8 lectures culminating in a business plan competition. In the future, Paula envisions collaboration with other organisations and placements within existing social enterprises, to encourage students to put theory into practice.

Global trends and the future of social enterprise

The future of social enterprise “depends on whether you look at it from a local or a global perspective…Social enterprises that are locally based can be very beneficial very quickly, and they can be relatively easy to run and set up. So far, many existing social enterprises are of a small to medium size, reflecting the large majority of small to medium commercial businesses”. In terms of impact however Paula however recognises that “global social enterprises have a big potential”.

Funding restrictions create difficulties “for people who want to set up an international social enterprise from the UK … because most funding is for projects that are going to benefit people in the UK”. But enterprises may well expand after initially operating in the UK, and “people are taking increasing notice, not just of multi-national companies, but also of international organisations”. The result is an increasing focus on “encouraging people to come up with new models in different places”.

Paula’s personal take on the future of social enterprise is that “it’s an increasingly viable concept because of the kind of economy that we’re in. If you’re a charity, you’re depending on fundraising, it’s something that can dry up easily… and it directly affects your possibility of having an impact whatever your cause is”.

The comparative sustainability of social enterprise is built into its very definition, and it is this which Paula finds most attractive about the concept: “the fact that you can continue to produce funds and maximise the benefits for your cause, whether social or environmental, in a sustainable way”.

As donors and funders of charities increasingly demand sustainability from organisations proposing to tackle social and environmental issues, it’s “less and less the case that charities are actually sustainable”. In their place, “social enterprise has huge potential”.

It is clearly palpable in her discussion and enthusiasm  that Paula has “found something to be passionate about.”

By Emilie Hobbs and Clara Marquardt

This is the final article in the Social Enterprise & Development blog series by Clara Marquardt and Emilie Hobbs. Other articles in the series include:

Social enterprises’ distinctiveness and social innovation – the driving force behind social enterprise?

The Finale!

Green Innovation in Business, Social Enterprise and Development, Interviews with Shaun Fitzgerald and Jerell Gill

Social enterprise in development, or for development?

The public development discourse, the ‘rise’ of social enterprise and a growing need for impact measurement

New Blog Series: Social enterprise – innovation, development and a new way forward

Social innovation and social enterprise

Social innovation is “the process of inventing, securing support for, and implementing novel solutions to social needs and problems which are more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than to private individuals” [1]. Social innovation can be a product, a production process, an idea, a piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or some combination. Social innovation is central to ‘what social enterprises do’, it is central to the creation of social value.

Nevertheless there is a risk of overlooking social innovation by focusing on social enterprise as an organizational form or on the social entrepreneurs behind the organisations.

In a 2005 Social Enterprise Research Agenda by Dr Helen Haugh from the Judge Business School, Cambridge University identified “opportunity recognition and innovation” as one of eight relevant research themes which would strengthen academics and practitioners’ ability to support social innovation [2].

Dr Helen Haugh is a professor at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University. Her research interests include social enterprise in community development and social enterprise as a development strategy for developing countries.

A growing understanding?

Dr Haugh argued in 2005 that the renewed interest in social enterprise “has been policy-driven, rather than research-led… Robust evidence of [social enterprises’] value and contribution remains illusive, and theories concerning their creation, management and performance have yet to be crafted”. Eight years on her analysis provides insights into where the discourse has evolved and where questions remain.

While she maintains that the interest in social enterprise continues to be driven by policy there has been an enormous amount of progress on the theoretical front: “as often happens when practice precedes scholarly research, the theoretical frameworks are developed after the phenomenon is in existence”. Researchers have placed an emphasis on “exploring the antecedents, processes and outcomes of social innovation”, an emphasis on understanding the ‘black box’ which generates social innovation. Such an understanding is critical if social innovation is to be sustained.

In line with the criticism that a lot of research remains fragmented, inconsistent and low in explanatory power [3], Dr Haugh however agrees that “tensions and questions” remain: “a lot of research has [for instance] been criticized because of lack of control groups as data is gathered from people running social enterprises”.

Such criticism notwithstanding a growing body of evidence is extending our understanding of social enterprise and innovation.

Social enterprises’ comparative advantage

The argument that social enterprises or social entrepreneurs are ‘simply more innovative’ is an unsatisfactory response to a set of complex questions: What is the comparative advantage of social enterprises relative to other (institutional) agents including markets, commercial businesses, governments and charities? To what extent can social enterprises create more social value relative to inputs?

A clear understanding of different organisations’ strengths is important if social value creation is to be maximized. Dr Haugh suggests that social enterprises have a particular advantage in that “by trying to achieve multiple roles and to balance economic, social and environmental responsibilities they gain greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public”. The UK social enterprise Patients Know Best which sought to develop a patient-controlled system which collates an individual’s healthcare records illustrates this argument. The fact that they could pledge not to use individuals’ health care data for commercial gain gave them a decisive advantage over for-profit companies seeking to enter the market.

Interestingly, this argument can be turned around. Social enterprises’ legitimacy could be undermined as their ‘social’ orientation clashes with profit generation. Dr Haugh points out that the argument hinges on which definition of social enterprise the public adopts: “if your view of social enterprise is that it is situated on the non-profit side of economy then the adoption of strategies that generate income might undermine their legitimacy. But if the view is that they are trying to change capitalism to make it more socially and environmentally friendly, then that could increase their legitimacy”.

Linked to the legitimacy ‘bonus’ is the argument that social enterprises may be able to call upon more inputs, more cheaply. As normative organisations founded on shared values, they may mobilize civic energy and voluntary commitment into the service of the common good.

Because social enterprises are working closely with communities, Dr Haugh further argues that they have a “better understanding of the needs of communities”. Social enterprises may “overcome information asymmetry via proximity” and may in the process generate “more responsive and flexible solutions” to social problems.

UK government policy in areas such as healthcare is shifting from delivery to co-creation, i.e. patients do not just receive but rather co-create services. Dr Haugh sees enterprise models that foster relationships between clients and service providers as well positioned to benefit from this shift. On the other hand “this needs to be weighed up with the costs of needing to be more flexible and responsive” – costs which may limit social enterprises’ potential to scale up their operations.

Is there something distinctive about social innovation?

The distinctiveness of social enterprises’ value creation process links to the nature of the innovation they undertake. Are social enterprises contributing to a shift in the meaning of innovation?

In public health social enterprises have pioneered microfranchising and mobile health (mHealth) technologies as delivery and communication mechanisms. In agriculture social enterprises have promoted microcredits and microinsurance. In both areas microfinance stands out as the social innovation and the social sector is encouraged to learn from Coca Cola’s highly effective product marketing and distribution strategy [4]. These innovations can be contrasted with the de novo invention of vaccines or high yield seeds.

In the area of ‘governance innovation’ the question becomes whether any social enterprise can advance without innovatively redefining how businesses are run to ensure that environmental, social and economic purposes are embedded within their operation. In the UK, social enterprise emerged as a means of socializing entrepreneurship via multi-stakeholder engagement, or the hiring of staff from disenfranchised populations – social enterprises’ operation itself was part of the ‘social value’ creation process. More recently however, the focus has shifted towards the US model of social enterprise, which sees merely enterprises’ purpose and output as providing a social benefit [5]. This shift has raised critical questions about whether innovation in governance is a necessary part of social innovation: do organisations’ internal and external objectives need to be congruent? Can social enterprises ‘exclude’ their own employees while ‘including’ marginalized customers?

The larger question which these examples raise is one of product, process, paradigm and system innovation. A question of innovation occurring on different levels: innovation in the delivery of products, a changing of markets and institutional structures and the shaping of the way a society conceives of a particular issue.

Are social enterprises linked with a shift from capital and technology-intensive product innovation towards process and system innovation? A shift from inventing new products or technologies towards improving the efficiency with which existing technologies are employed and combined?

Such a shift would suggest that the solution to many social problems is not to be found in new gadgets, but rather in a combination and re-conceptualization of existing resources.

Dr Haugh accepts that social enterprises may be raising the profile of these alternative types of innovation. But she maintains that the social economy “is and will continue to generate all types of innovation [even though] barriers [which have not yet been fully understood] may stifle specific types of innovation”. Room for further research remains.

Can innovation be ‘excessive’?

“Everyone talks about rock these days; the problem is they forget about the roll” [6]

“Social entrepreneurship is used almost interchangeably with social innovation”, notes Dr Haugh. More than 80% of academic definitions of ‘social enterprise’ include ‘innovation’ as a central capacity. At the same time, recent trends in the development literature towards a ‘positive deviancy approach’ acknowledge that solutions are often already existent among the target group. It is against this background that the notion of ‘innovation as a holy grail’ needs to be questioned.

The social enterprise sector is subject to numerous pressures in the direction of novel rather than incremental innovation. Years of (failed) development attempts have delegitimized anything but ‘new’ solutions and created a development sector impatient for breakthroughs, impatient for innovation as a ‘development shortcut’. These conditions are exacerbated by the business element of social enterprise – competition. Competition encourages a focus on gaining recognition for individual projects rather than for key developments in the sector.

For social enterprises, the combination of a weak evidence base on which new ideas have to be based and an investment culture that privileges the novel, means that a new model may be able to gain support more easily than an incremental adaption of a previously tried model. Social enterprises’ issue specific focus may further push them towards seeking a unique, original central idea. Finally, the difficulty of scaling up social enterprises limits the potential for mergers which could bring together different models.

A critical assessment may conclude that the result of these pressures is an indiscriminate search for innovation which is less effective than the incremental extension of existing services to a new beneficiary group. “It makes no sense to keep reinventing the wheel…we need to give greater priority to replicating successful models, rather than constantly encouraging new solutions to the same problems” [7].

In many ways this assessment resonates with the history of the NGO sector, which for a long period was critiqued for ineffectively learning from past mistakes and failing to adapt and improve existing models [8].

In a social enterprise context, the development of mHealth technologies illustrates this line of reasoning: mHealth is itself a promising step forward, but it may be linking mHealth technology with training programs for community health workers, a ‘traditional’ social ‘good’, which will generate the decisive breakthrough [9].

The novelty which is needed may be less about novelty per se than about understanding what others have done, about studying why others have failed and in adapting and improving models.

Commercial versus social innovation

“In a world buffeted by change, faced daily with new threats to survival, the only way to conserve is by innovating” [10]

The ‘excessive innovation’ criticism can be contested. Is innovation not particularly important where resources are scarce and problems have eluded resolution for a long time? Not necessarily.

The unique circumstances in which social enterprises operate and the demands they are seeking to fulfil may require a more cautious approach to novel innovation than would be appropriate in the commercial sector.

On the one hand the resource constraint aggravates the trade-off between incremental and novel innovation, between fashionable new social enterprises and less ‘sexy’ established operations.

Moreover innovation is inherently risky, especially where innovation occurs in untested environments and depends on a broad range of stakeholders as in the case of social innovation. Unlike with commercial innovation, for social innovation the cost of project failure exceeds the private cost to the entrepreneur. Interventions destabilize social equilibria and people may become reliant on new services. Project failure may then entail adverse consequences as the social needs which motivated the innovation persist.

Furthermore, any novel innovation initially has a limited population penetration. This is particularly true for social innovation which needs to be accompanied by gradual social change and growing acceptance. While top-down diffusion may be acceptable in the commercial world, it presents problems for enterprises with a social orientation. A good example is the contrast between the development of mHealth technologies and the development of mass media (TV and radio) health campaigns [11]. The former ‘novel’ approach, while increasingly wide spread, continues to ‘exclude’ many people. The latter approach leverages traditional and existing tools to reach a wider audience.

From another angle the operation of social enterprises may serve as an experimental laboratory for government service models. The cumulative knowledge gained from repeated implementations and incremental changes of a model in different circumstances, whether successful or not, is therefore not just of private value but also of social value.

Finally given the high context-specificity of social innovation competition is likely to reduce the potential for incremental innovation. New organisations would need to implement an incremental innovation in the same (geographical) environment as the original model to maximize their chance of success. This however is unlikely due to the market’s competitive nature (and may be undesirable as the service landscape would become too fragmented). This suggests that it is critical for social enterprises to communicate and share ideas, allowing existing enterprises to adopt suggestions for incremental innovation.

And in practice…

“Given that private sector models of income generation are being used”, competition between social organisations will always generate tensions – one aspect of which may be the emphasis on novel innovation.

But at the same time Dr Haugh points out that there are formal and informal platforms for refining and sharing models being developed. Dr Haugh raises an interesting idea: in the social enterprise sector social innovation may spread not necessarily via the scale of individual enterprises, but via consumer imitation and lead users. She cites the example of different communities innovating to perfect delivery modes. The sharing of information and best practices among social enterprises, communities and commercial enterprises is happening in the field of community transport and green energy: “when a community in the northeast of Scotland was planning to set up a community-owned wind farm, they actively communicated with other communities which had set up such a model”.

Social innovation and the ‘great stagnation’

Within the economic and public discourse the idea of a great stagnation, whereby the 21^st century will be characterised by a declining rate of innovation, has been a recurrent theme based on both quantitative proxies of innovation and ‘public perception’ – “after all we are still riding cars and dying from cancer” [12].

This pessimistic argument clashes with the image of an (excessively) innovative social enterprise sector.

One way of reconciling the two is by maintaining that: “there have only been a few truly fundamental innovations. While there will be more innovation, it will not change the world like the phone” [13]. Social innovation is merely harnessing existing technologies and therefore bound to run into diminishing returns.

On the other hand an optimistic view, adopted by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in his work Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950) suggests that “the entrepreneurial alertness takes place in the mind of the politician and the consequences can be compared with those of a technological innovation”[14].

Dr Haugh adopts the optimistic view and contests the ‘great stagnation argument’. In fact “social innovation could prosper exactly where commercial innovation slows down”.

In times of economic hardship people have to do more with less, and community needs are exacerbated. There might be fewer resources to innovate in the private sector and less resources to fund innovation and service provision within the public sector. Such conditions drive and provide opportunities for social innovation.

The (supposed) slowdown in the rate of innovation has been attributed to a growing ‘burden of knowledge’, which implies that it takes longer and longer for young innovators to catch up with existing research as a condition for inventing something new. As a result the typical age of first innovation has risen since the 1980s. In this regard social innovation as a new and developing field may benefit from the absence of a ‘burden of knowledge’ – whether this is desirable or merely furthers ‘excessive innovation’ is debatable.

Finally social innovation may expand the pool of innovators – a major opportunity. The motto of Ashoka “everyone is a changemaker”, reflects this. People across countries and communities are empowered to innovate. Developing countries are no longer confined to the follower role, but can themselves push the boundaries of the knowledge frontier – “Jugaad innovation” (frugal innovation) in resource scarce settings is a case in point [15]. Cross-sector fertilization is transforming the role of bureaucracies, governments and commercial businesses. Governments are no longer merely establishing regulation, businesses no longer merely fighting regulation and the social sector is no longer merely monitoring either sides’ mistakes – collaboration has the potential to increase innovation.

The next and final article in the blog series will explore the characteristics of budding entrepreneurs – the future drivers of social innovation – from the perspective of Beyond Profit, a student run social enterprise organisation.

[1] “Rediscovering Social Innovation” (Deiglmeier et al, 2008)

[2] “A research agenda for social entrepreneurship” (Haugh, 2005)

[3] “Innovation is Not the Holy Grail” (Seelos et al, 2012)

[4] Melinda Gates (2010)

[5] This shift is seen in e.g. the development of the UK Social Enterprise Mark since 2010

[6] Keith Richard

[7] “Investing in social franchising” (Richardson et al, 2012)

[8] This has clearly changed in the past few years, see for instance the Engineers Without Borders’ Failure Report (first published in 2008)

[9] “Using mobile technology to train community health workers” (Dalberg, 2012)

[10] Peter Drucker, management consultant and leading ‘business thinker’

[11] This approach is being employed very effectively by DMI (Development Media International)

[12] For a recent expression of this view see “Has the ideas machine broken down?” (The Economist, 2013)

[13] Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University

[14] Cited in “Environmental issue entrepreneurship: a Schumpeterian perspective” (Albrecht, 2002)

[15] “Jugaad innovation” (J. Prabhu et al, 2012)

Over 70 people came to the finale event of the Innovation & Development Hackathon to hear new approaches to real poverty and hunger challenges.

The 2013 Innovation and Development Hackathon, came to a close on the 23^rd March after a week of intensive collaboration and innovation. The event was part of the Cambridge Science Festival and was,  run by the Humanitarian Centre and CUTEC, The Hackathon provided a platform for students and professionals to apply their skills to development challenges posed by NGOs, companies, social enterprises, research institutes and consultancies. As Anne Radl, the Projects Manager at the Humanitarian Centre put it, the goal of the Hackathon, is to provide “an infusion of new thinking”.

The Finale

The Innovation & Development Hackathon finale was hosted by the University of Cambridge Office of Public Engagement at the Pitt Building in Cambridge, where over 70 students, professionals, and members of the public eagerly waited to hear  new ideas generated by the six teams that took part in the event.

Each audience member was awarded a voting card: to pick the winning team, the audience vote was equally weighted with the decisions of a panel of experts in international development, enterprise and innovation. Each team  had exactly 5 minutes to present their ideas and to receive questions from the audience and judges (2 minutes each).

Approaches, not solutions

The six teams each addressed challenges relating to issues of poverty and hunger, thereby linking with the Humanitarian Centre’s theme of the year on food security. Through the presentations, the scope and diversity of the challenges became clear; each team described different, yet equally inventive, approaches to their individual challenes[1].

The Afrinspire group came up with a low-resource points system, ‘Tally Me In’, to incentivise women to regularly attend a literacy and life skills programme, even when the short term opportunity cost of attending class rises, as it does when food is scarce. In ‘Tally Me In’, points are awarded for attendance, as well as punctuality and progress. The team adapted the successful Grameen group model, where annual rewards are given, in accordance with the points accumulated, to the group as a whole. By providing more tangible and short-term incentives for class attendance, the model aims to reduce food security related dropout rates.

The Azuri Technologies team won first place at the Hackathon with their innovative combination of traditional and new technologies.

The Azuri Technologies team presented  the only ‘tangible’ solution—they brought along a prototype of a stand for existing Zeer pots (clay pots used to keep food cool in South Sudan and across Africa) with an integrated fan which links directly to Azuri’s 5V solar panels – the ‘Azuri pot’. By adding the fan,  shelf life of the products kept the Zeer pots is significantly extended, and the pots become usable inside and in  humid climates. The team made a convincing case that their solution, combining new and traditional technology, was cost-effective,  culturally appropriate and feasible.

The HubCiti group presented the idea of incorporating game mechanics into their crowd-funding platform. By creating an enjoyable online experience for users with user profiles, progress bars, rewards and personal goals, game mechanics will allow HubCiti to attract and retain online crowd-funders. As a result of this they will be able to scale up their crowd-funding model.

The iDE UK team proposed a two-step model allowing iDE to scale its very successful Farm Business Advisor (FBA) model across sub-Saharan Africa. During the first phase,  cooperation with local clusters of excellence in journalism and agricultural science would provide the foundation for a cost-effective, radio-based branding strategy with positive spill over effects, for example,  on youth unemployment. Once a critical size is reached, the model’s further expansion is supported by a strategy to increase the FBAs’ profits. The strategy revolves around the utilisation of the FBAs’ close networks with remote customers/farmers. Asking the FBAs to conduct surveys and to provide agricultural input suppliers with customer feedback will strengthen bottom-up information flows and provide FBAs with a competitive advantage in selling customer-adapted products.

The Mott MacDonald group presented a novel way to use information, proposing an innovative ‘flock analysis’, where people affected by an irrigation project could position themselves independently on a chart of benefits and risks. Their ‘flock analysis’ model could inform the decisions of Mott MacDonald as to whether they should go ahead with a certain project. During the project’s implementation the model would allow Mott MacDonald to assess support for the project by the people and communities affected.

The final team, Nunuza, presented a series of ‘hacks’: innovative adaptations of the Nunuza platform which would ensure that SMS users would not default on their transactions. Among the proposed low-cost hacks were upfront payments into a ring-fenced account, a linkage of Nunuza with MPesa and GPS tagging.

Whether or not any of the teams approaches turn out to be “on the ground” solutions remains to be seen. Several of the organisations that posed the challenges have said that it may be appropraite to pilot their team’s idea, and continue to shape it with local feedback and input. Should the pilots prove successful, it may be that the Innovation & Development Hacakthon did indeed turn out some solutions to pressing challenges of poverty and hunger.

And the winner is . . .

It was incredibly difficult to choose between the different groups. Nevertheless, in the end the results from the audience vote correlated exactly with those of the judges. The Nunuza team took third place, the Afrinspire team took second, and  first place went to . . . the Azuri Technologies group!

Everyone is a winner

The real goal of the Hackathon is not to win, but to have a space to try different approaches, apply skills to different areas, and to learn.

Kata Fulop, Team Coordinator of the Afrinspire group, said, “one thing I learned is how widespread mobile phones are in Africa, [it’s] amazing how many interesting projects there are out there”. But Kata’s challenge was set in an area with low technology levels which made the challenge,finding, “an idea using pen and paper to make it work”.

Reflecting on the process as a whole Kata describes benefits all round: “students benefit; we all learned a lot… organisations benefit; Afrinspire has already decided to hold a conference on our proposal … [it is also] good for the Humanitarian Centre in attracting more attention to these issues and challenges”.

Three participants, Adelina Chalmers, Igor Romanov (Mentor) and Yu Bian (Team Coordinator) from the HubCiti team learned most about the importance of presentation and communication, i.e. “how to communicate complex ideas clearly so as to get people on board”,  how to manage teams effectively, and “how to stay calm and professional to ensure that everything goes smoothly”. For some this was their first contact with a social enterprise, and it opened up a whole new channel to come into contact with novel and interesting ideas – simply “fantastic.” All three of them found a lot of complimentary ideas amongst the different teams which they saw both as a potential source of collaboration as well as a reminder of the importance of differentiating their ideas from those of other teams. They all agreed that they “definitely plan to take the ideas forward”.

The feedback from audience members was just as positive: An audience member, Michael, who heard about the event through the Cambridge Science Festival, was positively surprised by the presentations: “Certainly not what I anticipated….an interesting competition in relation to diverse challenges which have been set by the different organisations… I must admit judging between them is extremely difficult, as it is not comparing apples and apples.” Although personally feeling that “several projects felt like they had been inspired more by academic study than by reality on the ground”, he was “particularly impressed with Azuri pot – practical and simple…a solution which will actually work”.

Marian, an audience member interested in innovation in health and development, was “positively surprised with quality of ideas and age of population, a very dynamic and inspiring group of people”. Impressed with the innovative, interesting approaches, she saw one of the big benefits of such an event as reaching out, beyond an inner development cirlce, to share  ideas with the broader public. Marian is sure that she “will follow up on the different projects and organisations”.

A personal note

As both a co-author of this blog series and a team coordinator of the iDE UK group, I learned a lot about the challenges and the potential of having a group of very diverse people working together on one challenge. It was eye opening to see how people’s academic background and cultural context shapes their approach to issues.

From another perspective, the Hackathon proved to be very effective exercise in deconstructing the process of innovation. How do you go about coming up with something new in an environment where it seems as if everything that could be tried has already been tried? Interestingly, what mattered for our team was believing in an initial idea,  but approaching it from a different angle when we came up against barriers and evidence of previous (failed) attempts at building a similar model.

Finally, coming from the discipline of ‘development economics’, I realised just how difficult it is to avoid the mistakes for which development projects are typically faulted. For example,. how do we ensure that our model is feasible on the ground and in a local context?

In the end, for me  it was a fantastic learning experience above all. And if  the organisations take up and develop our solutions further  it will be a testament to the fact that we achieved what we set out to achieve.

The final takeaway

As the 2013 Hackathon came to an end, participants, audience members, judges and mentors left “infused with new thinking”. I personally felt inspired and enthused by the number of students of different ages coming together and using their time and skills to find new approaches to global problems.

I spent the rest of the evening absorbed in a discussion of the different solutions with a friend. I can only agree with Marian’s remark that “while some ideas will need a bit more work and some are already a bit further, they all have at least the potential to become very interesting propositions”.

For now, I am looking forward to catching up with the Azuri team in one year to see where their idea has taken them!

By Emilie Hobbs and Clara Marquardt

There are two more articles forthcoming in this blog series on development and social enterprise, so watch this space! Previous articles include:

 The public development discourse, the ‘rise’ of social enterprise and a growing need for impact measurement

 Social enterprise in development, or for development?

Green Innovation in Business, Social Enterprise and Development, Interviews with Shaun Fitzgerald and Jerell Gill

[1] For a detailed description of the different challenges see http://www.humanitariancentre.org/2013/03/Hackathon-challenges/

This year’s EcoHouse design for Brazil. Constructed in a weekend by ecohousers in Cambridge. (c) EcoHouse Initiative

This is the third article in Emilie Hobbs and Clara Marquardt’s blog series on social enterprise and development.

As our impact on the environment fails to slow despite waning public concern [1], the call for ‘green’ action is escalating across all sectors. Amidst declining resources, innovation is arguably one of our most important remaining, and in a sense renewable, resources. Innovation is crucial in preventing and adapting to the physical changes in our environment. I spoke with two individuals closely involved in green innovation in different ways: Shaun Fitzgerald, co-founder and Managing Director of Breathing Buildings [2], and Jerell Gill, president of The EcoHouse Initiative [3], to gain an understanding of how innovation is carried out in varying, green contexts.

Breathing Buildings and the EcoHouse Initiative

Shaun Fitzgerald was involved in Breathing Buildings from the start; its roots trace back to a research project at the University of Cambridge funded by BP “on the topic of how can you create a low energy building using different ways of approaching ventilation”. During the project, results from the research program were shared with people involved in industry; architects, engineers and building owners. The technology was patented (owned by the University of Cambridge), and as the situation evolved, a new company ‘Breathing Buildings’ was formed, with both BP and the University of Cambridge taking equity stakes in it, reflecting their involvement in the project. Breathing Buildings’ success has been recognised with several awards (both for the innovation and the product itself), and their low energy e-stack ventilation system has now been implemented in over 65 buildings across the UK.

The EcoHouse Initiative is a relatively new collaborative platform, emerging on the scene only two years ago. Although it shares Breathing Buildings’concern for the built environment, this focus is only a starting point for its wider aims to “accomplish social inclusion, poverty reduction and climate change adaptation through sustainable developments.” With student enthusiasm and desire for bringing about positive, practical change, the initiative is only at the start of its potential. Jerell outlined the two main projects run by EcoHouse alongside several growing initiatives: a transitional housing project,where they act as design consultants for emergency housing built for those in need, working in conjunction TECHO, a Latin American NGO,and a longer-term permanent housing project “designing permanent housing as a sustainable accessible social housing solution for people in Latin America who simply don’t have that solution at the moment”.

Innovation in Breathing Buildings and the EcoHouse Initiative

Innovation plays a crucial role in both Breathing Buildings and the EcoHouse Initiative, and although there are differences in their approaches, both are clear about its central importance in our world. I asked about the role of innovation in their work, and what percentage of it could be described as innovation:

Jerell Gill (JG): I would like to say that it’s 100% of everything you do […] it’s something that the initiative is founded on.

Innovation is a word that I suppose is banded about quite often, it’s almost trendy, lots of people like to use and it has a lot of impact, when people hear innovation they think wow you’re doing something important. But it’s important to understand why.

The way I see it at the basic level, and it’s the view of the whole initiative, is that innovation is quite often simply necessary to find the best solution possible to a problem. In the work that we’re trying to do, creating and implementing sustainable developments in the developing world, the problems we aim to solve are inherently woven with interesting and quite difficult challenges, so innovation often comes by necessity into the work that we’re doing.

Shaun Fitzgerald (SF): Innovation is absolutely critical to change the world we live in.

Interestingly enough, having bright young engineers, scientists, thinking about cool ideas of how to go and do things, it’s probably only 20% of the recipe that you need to go and be a successful innovator.

The UK’s not short of great ideas,  but we are short of the ability to translate them into reality, to make a difference. It’s all about the skill sets that you have within the team that is going to be built around executing this idea, and you need to be commercial heavy and – I’m not going to say technical light, you need to have enough technologists, engineers, scientists, to do a good job – but you need to be well-resourced in making sure you’ve got people who will make things happen.

The one thing you need to do is to be able to have people who can communicate with potential customers, who can explain what the merits of this are, so you’ve got traction and real interest from people who would buy this product, so you need to be having sales people almost from day one.

The best sales people, and this is a very rare breed, are people who are fantastic technologists, but who can communicate in really clear passionate terms to go and get somebody else sufficiently excited so that they will buy that product.

Collaboration in Innovation

Collaboration between people with different skillsets is also crucial in the work that EcoHouse carries out, and is something they explicitly emphasise. The EcoHouse Initiative works closely with students of different subjects, and also individuals of various professions, in both academia and industry. Furthermore there is an important international element to the initiative; teams within Brazil work in parallel to teams in Cambridge through collaboration with the NGO TECHO, as well as other individuals, universities and governments in developing countries. Jerell Gill reflects on the multi-disciplinary dimension of the initiative, explaining how this collaboration in innovation itself requires a novel form of innovation in communication.

JG: A multi-disciplinary approach is important, and that’s something we try and stress in EcoHouse. It’s important to try and provide a variety of knowledge, skills and experience and allow new connections to be made between different areas. For example, we get social scientists involved, engineers and architects.

In many developing countries there are also a lot of really talented people … and you realise they’re really well equipped to tackle these problems as well, but sometimes they don’t have the right tools or resources. It’s up to us to innovate and make sure that we’re communicating in innovative ways and using those skills and in particular using their drive and the amount of insight they have in their home counties.

The innovation doesn’t come into it just through the technical design and the technology, but also comes into ways of thinking and communication. I think the key philosophy for us is in everything that we do there needs to be two-way input, two-way transfer.

We also try and transfer skills two-way. Something which we hope to do in the future, is training not just in Cambridge for the people here, but also training out in Latin America. Not only hopefully training people there, but they’ll receive training on local knowledge, local skills out there and be able to bring that back to the UK.

Being out in the field is a key part of it, whenever someone’s there, you want to absorb and expel as much as possible; everything you can learn throughout your life you need to try and pass on those skills and make them relevant out there. And I see all of that as innovation in that we try and weave it into everything that we’re doing.

The role of the customer in the process of innovation

Although innovation often conjures the image of a creator or inventor – the innovator – technological innovation must constantly remain focused on the eventual use of the idea; the problem demanding a solution. Within Breathing Buildings, great emphasis is placed on the people on the other side of innovation; the customer, who is centrally implicated in the continuous process of innovation in the company. Dealing with the needs of the customer above those of the innovator may sometimes produce an element of compromise, both in the technology of the product itself, as well as in pricing and in time. For the EcoHouse Initiative, listening to the needs of the customer is equally crucial in refining the final solution, despite posing a further challenge.

SF: The most important thing for innovation is to continue to listen very very carefully to your customers or your potential customers … continue to talk and understand the problems that people are facing, what the problems are, what the challenges are.

One of the areas of compromise is understanding what the use of your new idea might be for the customer and therefore, although you want to do the very best, you can’t change the world overnight. … You might need to build in some compromise to your product, for example building in some redundancy which means that it’s more expensive than you really want it to be. Always keep the customer in mind, trying to make it work so that you’re meeting their demands, more than you’re meeting your ambition overnight.

JG: It is completely driven from the other end. I suppose I talk a lot about Cambridge because we’re based in Cambridge and a lot of people involved come from Cambridge or have some sort of connection with it. A lot of our work is done while we’re here, which makes that period when we go out into the field even more intense because that is the most important part of what we do: it is customer-focused at the end of the day.

Sometimes the solutions you come up with, they seem completely the best solutions in your mind, and it’s something that maybe socially they’re not as inclined to accept as the current solutions they have which possibly don’t work as well. So you have to do a lot of work in working with them, and there’s a bit of convincing there, but you have to be careful that you’re not just trying to convince them. You’re also constantly questioning if you’ve come up with actually the best solution, have you factored in all of these social factors as well? Culture plays a big part in it.

How does culture and lifestyle affect innovation?

The role of culture in bringing innovative ideas to life (or preventing this) is something seen in countless examples. For instance, the electric car industry is one area in which progress has been slow despite clear potential benefits (see David MacKay’s ‘Sustainable energy – without the hot air’ [4]), delays which could be attributed, among others, to a lack of infrastructure and a reluctance to adopt change in industry and in our lifestyles. In the building industry delays are also apparent, preventing bright green ideas from becoming instantly mainstream and having an important impact on the process of innovation.

SF: There are a number of different types of delay, and a number of them are out of your control. For example, in the building industry, we want people to change their behaviour because it makes sense from an energy point of view, and even if it they’re not paying any more for it, there is, within the industry, an educational barrier. Certain parties within the industry do things the way they’ve always done it because it’s easier for them.

One of the ways that you can force them to take on new ideas is by having the regulations changed. The energy efficient targets for example, of buildings, are just made even more onerous, and therefore inefficient technologies will find it even more difficult, maybe impossible, to reach those targets.

Lifestyle will change, and for me one of the longest timescales is a generation, so 25, 20 years. Behaviour is instilled in children within school, values and expectations are completely different from one generation to another. If you look at the recycling baskets, it’s just socially unacceptable to not sort out your rubbish, when I was at school we never did that – those are attitudinal changes. And that’s the longest timescale; it can of course be shorter than that with great marketing and regulations.

The role of the private sector in tackling global issues

Between the two organisations featured in this article, certain parallels and divergences are apparent. Most keenly apparent was Breathing Building’s emphasis on the ultimate role of the customer, and their clearly focused aims of refining their technology to its maximum potential and bringing it to as many people – or buildings – as possible. Within EcoHouse, although these aims are clearly important, their primary ambitions lie in bringing social inclusion, poverty reduction and climate change adaption, with an emphasis on teaching and learning for all actors involved, and using the built environment as a tool for these ends. But substantial similarities are also apparent in the range of skills involved in carrying out innovative ideas, in the importance of communicating ideas to customers, and the centrality of innovation itself. I asked Jerell Gill and Shaun Fitzgerald what distinguished the EcoHouse Initiative from a company and how the private sector was important for climate change.

JG: Probably what I feel distinguishes the initiative from a company for example that has similar goals is that we involve a wide range of people on this level. As well as the students who are involved in the society and the academics who are involved in the cluster, there are also technical partners who are involved, so we do get links with industry. Anyone who’s interested in what we’re doing can help out with the stuff that we do, and also partners like the Latin American NGO.

In the work that we do, it’s not just the output we’re producing, along the way we’re teaching the people, we also have the student-led training team for example, that focuses solely on making sure that all of the people associated and involved with the EcoHouse initiative are learning as much as possible and have the right skills to tackle the problems. That ranges from technical skills to ways of thinking to issues of the environment and sustainability as well.

SF: You do need the private sector to be involved in anything to do with climate change, but we’re never going to solve climate change just with the private sector. You need to have a mixture of entities.

Developing new technologies is something that is very well suited to the private sector. So for example, with the electric car, it needs to be private companies that are developing the hybrids, the new electric car; [we need] car companies but with government support for large infrastructure changes to overcome that barrier.

[The nuclear industry] have a particular challenge to do with risk profile, that’s not to do with timescale, but that’s to do with risks. There are types of risk that private companies just cannot bear, this type of liability has to be a public liability.

Students & Universities in innovation

Universities are unique institutions out of which many of this world’s future decision makers will emerge,. Universitiesare the places where students are often inspired to pursue a certain path. Many courses place great emphasis on theoretical study, perhaps even more so at Cambridge, and although the importance of this work is undisputed, alternative, more practical methods of teaching are also necessary to equip students for future work. Are universities responsible for inspiring students to take ethical or thoughtful consideration of global issues? Should they provide opportunities for us to practically apply theory we deal with in our studies?

JG: Part of the reason why I initially got involved in EcoHouse was because I thought it really gave that opportunity that Cambridge University wasn’t giving me in terms of practical skills–not just in applying engineering theory that I’ve been learning into creating sustainable solutions, but also in what challenges are involved in getting these solutions to be adopted.

But also, as president of the EcoHouse society, I’ve learnt a lot about managing people and inspiring people,–inspiring people to tackle these sorts of challenges.It’s really important that we show people that it is actually possible for lots of people from different backgrounds to get involved and make a difference. It’s important to show students as well as academics, opening the eyes of people who work in the university to the sort of possibilities and opportunities that are available to them in using a lot of the research that we do and applying it to the real world.

I think universities do have a big responsibility, because often they are at the cutting edge of research, and all it takes sometimes is just someone to step back for a minute and say, ‘actually, what we’re doing can be applied in a useful way.’

SF: Students, as they leave university, are trying to contemplate what career they might do. Are they driven to go and earn a lot of money, or do they have a big ambition for what they want to achieve in their life (for example climate change)? [For those who have a driving ambition to change the world] actually what they do to go and fulfil that ambition really doesn’t matter; the world needs everything that they could possibly do. For example, you’ve got people that might want to go into government and deal with policy, you might get scientists and engineers who go and develop new technologies, you may well have some who go into the finance industry.

So university, at one level wants to educate you, but I would say of equal importance is that they should inspire you to want to go and change the world; it is a crucial role that the university has.

The use of innovation

The importance of innovation is something felt across all sectors and fields, in businesses and social enterprises alike. Innovation will be required, for as long as humanity continues to face challenges, to change and to develop. Today, innovation also represents much more than the solutions to problems; its influence as a term attracting attention in all spheres is a powerful tool for many causes, and an encouragement for the future role of innovation in our world.

JG: Innovation is useful in creating really good solutions and you can innovate in lots of different ways not just in technology and design, but also in communication. Innovation is trendy and it attracts a lot of attention – you can turn that into a positive thing,. Particularly with the sort of stuff that EcoHouse is doing, you want to attract attention. By basing everything you’re doing on innovation, you can show lots of different people around the world that innovation can be done by students, by academics, by people in industry, by anyone. And that you can create something really inspiring, something amazing, something thought-provoking, through innovation that stimulates people around the world, and gathers people for your cause. And innovation is not just a tool for finding really good solutions, but also raising awareness.

Many thanks to Shaun Fitzgerald and Jerell Gill for their contributions to this article.

References

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/28/public-concern-environment
2. http://www.breathingbuildings.com/home
3. http://www.ecohouseinitiative.org/
4. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_127.shtml

The Afrinspire Team gets to work on their challenge for the Innovation & Development Hackathon

“What exactly is a Hackathon?” This is a question that participants in the Innovation & Development Hackathon have answered many times over the past week.

The term hackathon is appropriated from the tech community; it is an event that brings different people together, for a period of intensive collaboration, to “hack” out a solution to a problem, or come up with a new, usable idea or project.

At the Innovation & Development Hackathon, students and professionals work in teams for one week to find enterprising new approaches to real development problems. This year’s Innovation & Development Hackathon has drawn over 30 “innovators”, from backgrounds as diverse as electrical engineering, sociology, geology and community development.

The teams will present their ideas at a finale event on Saturday, 23 March, from 5:00-7:00pm at the Pitt Building, on Trumpington Street, University of Cambridge. The public is invited to come along, and should register to attend at: http://csf2013hackathon.eventbrite.com/#

The Innovation & Development Hackathon is part of the Cambridge Science Festival and is supported by the Humanitarian Centre and the Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club (CUTEC). Leading up to the launch of the Humanitarian Centre’s “Food Security Year” on May 28^th, all of the Hackathon challenges are focused on enabling people in developing countries to have more sustainable access to nutritious food.

Six organisations—a mix of charities, social enterprises, companies and student start-ups—presented actual challenges they are facing in the field.  All of the challenges call for creativity and ingenuity, and participants gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the issues by working with a mentor from the organisation throughout the week.

Afrinspire, a charity working in grassroots development in east Africa, challenged its team to think of new ways to support women to complete a literacy and life skills programme, which is proven to improve their agricultural outcomes. However, in the face of imminent food insecurity, women are often called away from their classes and into their fields.

Azuri Technologies, a company that brings power at scale to off-grid customers in rural emerging markets, asked the innovators to develop an application to improve food security that relies on access to electricity at 5V, 1A for 4 or 8 hours per day, and would be appropriate for their customers in sub-Saharan Africa.

The iDE UK team has spent the week thinking about how to get existing knowledge and technology for improved farming practices down “the last mile”, to the most isolated farmers in developing countries. And Mott MacDonald‘s International Development Division presented a challenge that will help the company to ensure that the welfare of smallholder farmers is at the heart of the large infrastructural projects they undertake in developing countries.

This year, two student start-ups are also taking part in the Hackathon. HubCiti and Nunuza were both recently awarded £1K prizes from Cambridge University Entrepreneurs to develop their business plans. The innovators who work on these teams have the opportunity to support a budding Cambridge company, and strengthen its potential to provide services in developing countries that increase farmers’ access to the marketplace.

Checking in with the Afrinspire team on Friday morning to get their feedback on the Hackathon so far, they said, “It’s been an eye-opening, inspiring and challenging experience. We’re looking forward to hearing the other teams’ ideas on Saturday evening.”

The winners of last year’s Hackathon, which focused on global health challenges, have since gone on to develop their innovation, called Sim-Prints, and are taking it to the pilot stage this summer. Sim-Prints is a system for storing and accessing medical records electronically, which uses simple mobile phones.

Mariya Chhatriwala, one of the co-founders of Sim-Prints, says, “Participating in Global Health Hack Day last year showed me that the most creative solutions to global health challenges can come from individuals attacking it from an outsider’s perspective.  My team found the experience both fun and mentally stimulating.”

The prize for this year’s winning team will be sponsored by ARM. ARM supports invention and innovation in tackling the complex challenges of global poverty and inequality. ARM is a sponsor of the Humanitarian Centre’s Food Security Year.

For more information about the Innovation & Development Hackathon, contact:

Anne Radl, Projects Manager

The Humanitarian Centre

+44 (0) 1223 760 885

anne.radl@humanitariancentre.org

For more information about participating organisations in the Innovation & Development Hackathon:

Afrinspire

www.afrinspire.org.uk

Azuri Technologies

www.azuri-technologies.com

HubCiti

Email: Michael Worthington at michael@zapawa.com

iDE UK (International Development Enterprises UK)

www.ide-uk.org

Mott Macdonald – International Development Division

www.mottmac.com

Nunuza

Email Qaiser Khan at qzkhan@gmail.com

The Innovation & Development Challenges are online at: http://www.humanitariancentre.org/2013/03/hackathon-challenges/

For more information about the organisers:

The Humanitarian Centre

www.humanitariancentre.org

Email Anne Radl at anne.radl@humanitariancentre.org

Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club (CUTEC)

http://www.cutec.org

Email Meenal Pore at meenal.pore@googlemail.com

Cambridge Science Festival

http://www.cam.ac.uk/sciencefestival/

Email Nicola Buckley at Nicola.Buckley@admin.cam.ac.uk

For more information about the sponsor:

ARM

http://www.arm.com/

On Tuesday 19th March,  almost 500 ‘Georges’ from across the country–me included–gathered in Parliament Square at 7.30am to begin a morning of mass impersonation. The aim: to capture the attention of the media and the imagination of people around the country on budget day, while continuing to exert pressure on the government (George Osborne in particular) to keep its promise to devote 0.7% of Gross National Income to foreign aid.

The first port of call was Westminster Bridge, where we entertained commuters and discovered that the (lovingly hand-made) masks weren’t great for visibility.

From there we headed to Westminster tube station, attracting a barrage of questions from intrigued passers-by.

Photo: IF campaign.
(I’m the one in the leftmost corner!)

Photo: IF campaign

The main event came at 8.30 am when the full horde of Georges assembled on the grass on Parliament Square and were ushered into the shape of ‘IF’ for the media shots from the crane. The BBC and Sky News were among those to have photographers on the crane platform, and the story was subsequently picked up by the Metro, Reuters and local media.

Photo: IF campaign

After more than an hour in the cold, the Georges happily dispersed, only stopping to pose with Nelson Mandela’s statue, certain he would have approved.

Photo: Emily Loud

Still clad in ill-fitting suits, a smaller group then proceeded to the House of Commons to lobby our MPs on the ‘Enough Food For Everyone IF’ budget issues. Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, took the time out to meet me and reiterate his support for the campaign. He added, “in fairness to Osborne, he has been talking about aid, and that’s good, but it’s not the same as actually delivering it.

I don’t know what will be in the budget tomorrow, but I think the commitment to international development aid has to stay. I’m proud that we’ve actually got the chance of meeting the 0.7% aid target for the first time ever, we promised it in 1971 – it only took us 40 odd years!”

Julian Huppert and me at the lobbying session.

It is hoped that the media stunt and lobbying will pressure the cabinet to keep their promises, and generate productive questions about aid and tax avoidance in the budget debate, which will take place on Thursday 21^st March.

If the prospect of investing in agricultural projects to help the 900 million people worldwide going to bed hungry weren’t encouragement enough, last week 27 business executives wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself to urge him to keep the 0.7% commitment. Among the letter’s signees were the CEOs of GlaxoSmithKline, BP and Dixons. Together they stressed that spending on international development aid was “not only the right thing to do, but a smart investment”. They continued, “developing countries become emerging economies and emerging economies became the engines of future global growth an prosperity”.

The issue of tax transparency in multinationals, however, might be more difficult to achieve since (predictably) it has not received the same kind of corporate support that aid has. However, after revelations of tax avoidance at multinationals like Amazon, Google and Starbucks last year, we can be optimistic that Cameron and Osborne will address tax avoidance it in the manner implied by the Chancellor’s statement of December 2012:

“We will put more resources into ensuring multinational companies pay their proper share of taxes. With Germany and now France, we have asked the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) to take this work forward and we will make it an important priority of our G8 Presidency next year.”

All we can do now is wait for the budget announcement, and hope that the George masks made by the ‘Enough Food For Everyone IF’ campaign don’t prove to be an extended metaphor for the Chancellor’s economic strategy: with such tiny eyeholes, it was hard to see the bigger picture!

Photo by Emily Loud

All are welcome to the finale event of the Hackathon where teams of students will present their new approaches to these challenges; the audience and expert judging panel will vote for the team with the most innovative and viable idea to win a prize. Please register to attend at: http://csf2013hackathon.eventbrite.com/

AFRINSPIRE: www.afrinspire.org.uk

Afrinspire supports indigenous development initiatives across East Africa. Working closely with community leaders, we understand the development needs of communities and tailor our support to meet these.

Whether through the provision of computers and educational materials, funding for schools and scholarships, helping set up new enterprise schemes, disseminating sustainable agriculture techniques, or financing the construction of water tanks, we work from the grassroots to empower the poor and reduce poverty.

One of the projects that Afrinspire supports is a Functional Adult Literacy programme (FAL) which embodies the spirit of empowerment, teaching ‘literacy and life skills aiming to move you out of abject poverty’. Their African partner has formed 69 groups in 4 regions, developing a successful strategy and assessing impact.  There is a lot of demand and opportunity to extend the programme, which teaches literacy and life skills through a series of practical, hands-on lessons covering everyday situations, health and hygiene, better farming, money management, saving, home improvement, improved food production.

One of the findings in the groups up to now is that women who were more prone to food insecurity were more likely to drop out of the course.  However, women who have stayed in the course until completion have since experienced better agricultural outcomes—and hence more stable access to food.

With your mentor to help paint a picture of the complex and interrelated reasons why some women experience more food insecurity and default on attending their groups, think of a new way Afrinspire can incentivise women to complete the functional adult literacy and life skills programme.

Mentor: Ian Sanderson, Chief Executive Officer and Founding Trustee

AZURI TECHNOLOGIES: www.azuri-technologies.com

Azuri brings power at scale to off-grid customers in rural emerging markets, providing basic needs that are regarded as routine in more developed countries. Azuri develop and manufacture Indigo, a revolutionary solar power technology and business model that is transforming the opportunity in off-grid emerging markets, enabling users to benefit from clean renewable energy and simultaneously halve their energy spend.

Indigo technology combines mobile phone and solar technology to provide pay-as-you-go solar power that replaces kerosene and phone charging services, while cutting users’ energy spend by as much as 50%. Customers can then over time progressively upgrade their system to support radio, TV and other household devices.

The ability to access more electricity allows people to dramatically change their lifestyles. Indigo is already having a transformative impact on people as well as communities in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Sudan and South Africa, where the solar solution has improved health, economic opportunities and the environment.

Keeping in mind the context and markets in which Azuri work in sub-Saharan Africa, develop an application to improve food security that relies on access to electricity at 5V, 1A for 4 or 8 hours per day.

Mentors: Nigel Preston and Duncan Barclay, Product Development; Wanda Halbert, Marketing

HUBCITI

HubCiti is a Cambridge-student start-up social enterprise that creates a direct digital bridge between farmers in developing countries and online donors and supporters. HubCiti empowers farmers to earn a steady, good wage, create wealth and attain improved standards of living, rather than depend on hand outs. It also provides an engaging, enjoyable and interactive learning opportunity for online

donors and supporters to learn more about the challenges of farming and entrepreneurship in developing countries, and practically and collectively tackle the challenges of poverty.

HubCiti will first be launched in Uganda, in the village of Kyaka where it has secured 250 acres of land. Kyaka has many landless, poor farmers who do not have jobs that provide regular income. HubCiti wants to create sustainable jobs that put local people’s knowledge to use—as well as provide them with a platform to grow their knowledge and expand their skills.

For example, HubCiti employees decide to launch an orange farm on 10 acres of land, creating jobs for 4 people. To launch the farm, HubCiti online users crowdfund £2000 to cover running costs for the first year. Online donors and supporters help run the crowdfunding campaign, and become familiar and invested in the orange farm project. Once £2000 has been secured, the farm is launched and the online users are kept up to date on the progress of the project—with transparent reports on how the money is being spent—through frequent communication with a HubCiti Project Manager.  When a problem arises, the Project Manager can present the farmers’ ideas about how to solve it to online users, who can take part in problem solving, and raise additional resources if needed. The revenue from the orange sales goes to sustain and grow the farming project for the next year by covering all necessary costs. Online users can continue to participate in running the orange farm alongside the farmers to ensure its continued success year after year. Workers make good, guaranteed wages, and profit is reinvested in other HubCiti projects. Online users develop “credits” to start other impactful HubCiti businesses that use local knowledge and employ local people.

What measurements/metrics can HubCiti use to ensure that businesses created through HubCiti are always geared towards creating a positive social impact for all parties involved, and also generate profit?    

Mentor: Michael Worthington, student University of Cambridge, CUE £1K Challenge winner in social enterprise stream

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES UK (iDE UK): www.ide-uk.org

iDE has 30 years of experience improving the incomes and livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At iDE, we believe that smallholders have the potential to feed their families, communities and the world; if they have access to two things:

1. Low cost agricultural technologies (low-cost irrigation) and inputs (seeds, fertiliser, etc.).

2. Technical support and advice on how to use these inputs and advice on effective farming techniques.

The challenge we face is how to get these inputs, and knowledge of how to use them, into the hands of poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa on a sustainable, scalable basis. This is one of the biggest challenges in African agriculture and for global food security. It is particularly important as in most countries public sector agricultural extension services are becoming increasingly limited. In addition community-based NGO projects that have attempted to fill this void in service delivery and provide advice through field staff, rely on external project funding. They are therefore unsustainable and not a long term viable solution to this complex challenge.

In recent years iDE has started to focus on ways of providing inputs and knowledge transfer through the market. We set out to take the key features of NGO service delivery and turn it into a financially viable business model. We came up with a new approach called Farm Business Advisors (FBAs) (private-sector extension agents). The FBA approach has been developed in Cambodia and is currently being refined and launched in Zambia.

How can iDE overcome the core challenges faced using the FBA approach in Zambia –namely the challenge of last mile (or 10 mile) distribution – to ensure the long term financial viability of the model? Are there other market-based, sustainable approaches which could be more effective at getting inputs/advice to smallholders? Can iDE incorporate/ make use of these approaches to better combat the challenge of food security?

This recent blog post on the business innovation facility might help you understand the issue of knowledge transfer: http://businessinnovationfacility.org/profiles/blogs/how-do-you-sell-knowledge-to-smallholder-farmers

This is more on the approach in Zambia – http://www.ideorg.org/OurResults/SuccessStories/RLG.aspx

Mentor: Sam Harvey, External Relations Assistant

MOTT MACDONALD – International Development Division: www.mottmac.com

Mott MacDonald Group is a diverse management, engineering and development consultancy delivering solutions for public and private clients world-wide. With technical expertise covering multiple sectors including water & environment, health & education and energy & transport, coupled with our geographical spread across 140 countries we have been providing international development services for over 30 years. Our services encompass technical assistance aimed at alleviating poverty and establishing good governance in developing and emerging economies, thereby establishing appropriate levels of healthcare, education, infrastructure, water and environment, while securing human rights and gender equality.

Mott MacDonald continues to have a long running involvement in major rural infrastructure projects within emerging economies such as those within sub-Saharan Africa. These projects are commonly irrigation development projects funded by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in areas that are currently farmed by smallholders. The projects aim to stimulate economic development by opening up the areas to more intensive agricultural practices.  Inevitably, this attracts large scale agri-businesses to the areas.

Effective implementation and delivery of such projects can result in a net benefit to the food security of the communities in which they are based.  However, there are concerns from charities such as Oxfam*  that the method of implementation favours large agribusinesses, and that there are inadequate safeguards in place to enable smallholders to be protected in the long term. For example, when the projects are implemented, traditional farming techniques can become too small-scale to be financially viable, resulting in smallholders being forced to become tenants or labourer to large agri-businesses. Smallholders might move away from their farms to look for work elsewhere, or because they are forced to vacate their property against their will, in a practice referred to as ‘land grabbing’.

How can Mott MacDonald develop safeguards to ensure that any projects it undertakes with clients (including IFIs) maximise the best possible outcomes for smallholders and the local communities where they are based? How can they make sure that projects that get through the design phase will continue to support smallholders to adapt and survive following the intensification of agricultural practices, and protect them against practices such as ‘land grabbing’ once the project moves to the operational phase.

Mentor: Sam Jewers, Civil & Environmental Engineer

*See for example http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/our-land-our-lives-time-out-on-the-global-land-rush-246731)

NUNUZA

Nunuza, which means Buy-Sell in Swahili, is a Cambridge-student software start-up that is creating a platform for people in developing countries to buy and sell things using an SMS-based system that is accessed through a simple mobile phone.

Buying and selling in the developing world can be a hassle: there is no easy way to connect with a buyer or seller apart from classifieds and physical marketplaces. There is a lack of accessible information about willing buyers and sellers of goods and services—especially for those who are isolated from markets.

Nunuza addresses the lack of trading infrastructure in developing countries by providing individuals with a virtual market that allows buyers and sellers to connect using their mobile phones. An SMS application has been developed by our team and is being tested in Kenya for its utility. Our goal is to have the same adoption rate as M-Pesa in Kenya; which is a successful SMS application for money transfer.

Mobile users in Africa have surpassed the mark of 400 million subscribers. Nunuza will initially seek to target the Kenyan market, and then expand into the larger African market. Kenya has been chosen due to the excellent infrastructure for supporting mobile phone usage and application development. The Kenyan market is ripe for the introduction of mobile applications. Our market research suggests that Kenyans are willing to use this application.

Nunuza will initially focus on the sale of agricultural products—targeting smallholders. 75 per cent of Kenyans are self-employed in agriculture, and most of these farmers cannot produce everything that they need; they often need to buy and sell different food products.

The system is to be piloted in summer 2013. There are still some challenges to be worked out surrounding remote transactions via SMS. The major drawback of a remote transaction is that there is potential for buyers or sellers to default.

To develop a fair and efficient market, and build trust in the Nunuza platform, how can Nunuza incentivise people not to default, and trade goods as promised through SMS agreement?

Mentor: Qaiser Khan, student University of Cambridge, CUE £1K Challenge winner in software stream

Dr Alex Nicholls is University Lecturer in Social Entrepreneurship within the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

In the second part of the blog series on social enterprise and development, Clara Marquardt speaks with Dr Alex Nicholls, a leading academic in the field of social entrepreneurship. The interview examines some of the implications of social enterprise for the least developed countries (LDCs). The impact social enterprises have in developing countries depends on their interaction with local institutions and their effect on long-term capacity building – which, in turn, shapes the future role of social enterprise.

Is social enterprise conceptualised as a source of development solutions or as type of bottom of the pyramid venture? Should the emphasis in our analysis of social enterprise be on the social or the enterprise? The social enterprise discourse cuts across disciplines and is conceptualised differently across sectors. Different interpretations of social enterprise’s role and function are not necessarily compatible.

In the development literature, emphasis is placed on participation and empowerment as the engines of progress, and on institution building as the key to long-term development. The Paris Declaration reflects these conclusions in a commitment to developing countries’ ownership of their development process and its alignment with their national interests.

Against this backdrop, the growing support for social enterprise by development institutions such as the World Bank suggests that the interplay of institutions and social enterprise needs to be examined.

The shifting social enterprise discourse

The early social enterprise discourse focused on social enterprise’s microeconomic dimensions. Increasingly however it has been recognised that social enterprise is inherently political: social enterprises interact directly with governments, they influence community level socio-political structures and they are associated with activism and lobbying. According to Dr Alex Nicholls, across all levels, social enterprises are not simply a “mechanism to fix malfunctions in existing…systems” but rather a “challenge to their continued existence as static institutions”.

This shifting conception of social enterprise is nowhere more significant than in context of the institution building efforts in developing countries. Reflecting such developments, Dr Alex Nicholls, the first lecturer in social entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, has identified a need to “add a public sector dimension to theories of social enterprise”^[1]. His recognition of social enterprise’s political dimension notwithstanding, Dr Nicholls has argued that social enterprise can offer solutions for the “wicked problems of the 21^st century”, for “climate change, the crisis of the welfare state…social dislocation and inequality, and educational failure”. Dr Nicholls’ views from outside the development discipline provide insight into an increasingly broad and subtle social enterprise discourse.

The meaning of development in an ‘era’ of social enterprise

An assessment of social enterprise’s role in development calls for an understanding of social enterprise’s impact on the conception of development. Dr Nicholls maintains that social enterprise has effected no shift in the focus or aims of development: “development has always been characterised by multiple approaches” and has combined an “enterprise, a local and a policy level agenda”. That said, social enterprise has affected a distinct move away from a “redistribution model of development”, based on donations and guided by a small elite, towards an “enterprise driven model of development”, which seeks to encourage self-development.

Dr Nicholls’ analysis suggests that social enterprises are challenging the paternalism and dependency culture associated with charity-led development. But given the prevalence of Western social enterprises in developing countries, could social enterprise not evolve into a new dependency culture?

Dr Nicholls contests this argument on the basis of the “hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of local social enterprises operating in India, Africa, Latin America and across Africa”. That said, he agrees that these indigenous enterprises are faced with a range of institutional, legal and structural constraints.

Moreover, social enterprises operating in developing countries are largely excluded from social investment innovation, which is almost exclusively directed at UK based social enterprises.

All in all, Dr Nicholls concludes that “social entrepreneurship can be elitist and exclusive…the genuine democratization of social entrepreneurship remains a pressing challenge” [2].

Dr Nicholls argues that a balanced development of Western and indigenous social enterprises depends on the “appropriate framing of the public discourse by organisations such as Ashoka”. If such a balanced development can be achieved then the envisaged shift of the development paradigm can be realised.

A move from charity towards empowerment – all good?

“If we find approaches that meet the needs of the poor, that generate profit for business and votes for politicians we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.”–Bill Gates, 2007

Social enterprises do not (usually) challenge governments or institutions overtly. But do they generate votes for politicians? The advancement of social enterprise could depoliticise development by presenting it as the sum of step-by-step solutions to ‘pathologies’: development as the solution of the ‘education problem’, of the ‘healthcare problem’, of the ‘crime problem’. This may destabilise the hard-earned consensus that a synergy of top-down and bottom-up efforts is needed: development does not materialise organically from the grassroots, no more than it trickles down from the top.

Development requires a provision of public goods but it also requires an emergence of national identities, of national cohesiveness and of state legitimacy. These objectives may be inseparable.

This critical view can be expressed in terms of a potential trade-off between short-term improvements and long-term institutional inertia. A link between social enterprise and institutional inertia is very conceivable in developing countries. Low state-capacity governments are confronted with social enterprises that are providing the foundation for non-existing services outside the government. By contrast, in developed countries, governments act as originators or contractors of social enterprises seeking to fill the gaps of existing services [3].

In light of this asymmetry the expansion of social enterprise in developing countries may shift the public development discourse (and development funding) towards organisations outside the government. The critical interrogation of institutional outcomes may be blunted. Governments’ responsibility may be diluted as “the boundaries of public–private action are blurred”. Governments may be induced to free ride on the services provided by social enterprises. Moreover, if successful projects fail to generate votes for politicians but failed projects lead to votes against politicians then governments may be actively weakened. In short, social enterprise may excuse and perpetuate state failure rather than fighting against it.

Dr Nicholls concurs that these are “major issues” which are “very problematic”. The possibility of a trade-off is actual: “social entrepreneurship can present a political problem to policymakers in developing countries”. His main concern is the “absence of a democratic mandate for the way these operations operate” or the way they define their vision of social change – a limitation of social entrepreneurship when compared with the tax-based state provision of welfare. For example, BRAC provides 50% of the primary education services in Bangladesh yet Bangladeshi citizens have no way of commenting on BRAC’s operation [4]. This is especially problematic as the provision of goods normally considered unsuited to market provision is occurring in absence of counterbalancing social welfare systems. Dr Nicholls stresses that the emergence of such “shadow states [is] deeply problematic for normative theories of democracy and theories of citizen participation in decision making around their lives”.

Will social enterprise reduce or exacerbate inequality?

Reducing inequality is a cornerstone of development efforts. While governments are (at least theoretically) bound to develop regions, equally social enterprises are unbound by such constraints. Social enterprises’ dependence on developed markets for sustainability could induce them to mimic the spatial concentration of NGOs. This could further regional inequality in an unaccountable manner – an illustration of the negative outcomes of an expansion of social enterprise at the expense of institutional development.

Dr Nicholls argues that while theoretically sound this criticism is not validated by empirical evidence: “it is not appropriate to say that social enterprises do not address the very poor – they do”. Some enterprises, looking to maximise their profitability will operate in developed areas where they can achieve this end. But for every such profitable social enterprise there are “hundreds, if not thousands that are not” and which work with “very small, very poor communities”. Microfinance is illustrative in this respect as “more than three quarters of microfinance institutions are not profitable and will most probably never be”.

On the other hand Dr. Nicholls agrees that “social entrepreneurship…can generate problematic externalities… [can have a] ‘dark side’”: Social enterprises may generate perverse effects in case of operational failure where vital public goods are suddenly no longer provided. Furthermore, given the “issue-driven nature” of social enterprises and a “lack of cooperation across organizations”, a “patchwork or serendipitous landscape of provision” can result [5]. Taken together these concerns do suggest that “social entrepreneurship will not necessarily function well in terms of equity of access across a whole population”.

The interaction of social enterprises and governments

Dr. Nicholls highlights how “well thought out social enterprises” do make strong attempts to partner with governments. BRAC “has been deliberative in trying to bring the Bangladeshi government into its education programme, with the aim that eventually the state will be capable of taking its model on, thereby allowing BRAC to step back”.

The best-designed interventions “move from crisis intervention towards an engagement of public policy makers”. The transition of responsibility may involve the building of broad and unconventional interest coalitions: When the Bangladeshi government failed to provide mobile telephony, the task was taken on by a social enterprise (Grameen) and a Scandinavian for-profit company (Telenor) who partnered in a joint venture (Grameenphone). This led to a successful reform of telecommunication, which was subsequently endorsed by the Bangladeshi government. The government provided additional resources to grow and stabilise the network.

In the ideal case successful collaboration may occur, but in general, according to Dr. Nicholls, social enterprise is “rarely a deliberative process. Social entrepreneurs are about action and action as soon as possible, rather than about carefully thinking though long-term implications of what they do”. The relevant development literature or the political dimension of their undertaking is “the least of their worries”.

Social entrepreneurs’ approach to governments is pragmatic: “if they need to work with governments they will work with governments, if they need to oppose governments they will oppose them and if they need to ignore them they will ignore them”. Dr. Nicholls cites the example of Ecoclubes, an environmental social enterprise operating across South America. The organisation has adopted a different model in almost every country. Depending on the institutional context the organisation may work closely with national governments, with regional governments, with business, with other NGOs or with none of them. While there are “examples of social enterprises working with national governments [there are] plenty of examples where they don’t”.

How to encourage collaboration, imitation and take-up

“In an aggregate, utilitarian analysis it is better to have social enterprises with no democratic mandate delivering education than having no education at all”. This argument, made by Dr. Nicholls, does not however justify complacency:the focus needs to be on designing models which mitigate the ‘institutional concerns’.

Small scale, disruptive initiatives have played a role in development: “the idea of business for a social purpose can be traced to at least the cooperative movement in 19^th century Britain”. But critical to the emergence of states which are more than an amalgamation of innovative solutions was the take-up of private sector initiatives by governments which integrated them into welfare states. This historical perspective reflects the Bangladeshi experience and highlights the need to focus on collaboration between social enterprises and governments and the take-up of initiatives by governments.

Dr Nichols argues that social enterprises will not be interested in supporting institution building unless institution building is within the scope of their activities. Based on this, is there a potential for governments to represent the locus of initiative? Could developing countries’ governments develop policies to coordinate social enterprises’ activities and stimulate social innovation? “A very good question” says Dr. Nicholls. But “to some degree [governments] have got better things to do…[They have to] provide a policy platform to have a functioning welfare state before worrying about social enterprise”.

That said, could the development of a social enterprise framework allow governments to target both objectives? Shifting the locus of initiative towards governments may allow them to develop a welfare state on the basis of social enterprise services while fending off the risk of institutional inertia. Publishing national priority lists of objectives; organising public policy competitions or signing (symbolic) service agreements with social enterprises – these are policies which could conceivably be implemented even by low state-capacity governments.

However, as Dr Nicholls points out some governments may simply be “uninterested in social enterprise”. In other cases, where developing countries’ governments do attempt to ‘coordinate’ bottom-up developments, they may encounter public mistrust – attempts at mandatory NGO-registration in Peru, Ethiopia or Cambodia illustrate this. Public trust in governments is often conditional on public good provision – a dilemma for developing countries’ governments.

Dr Nicholls suggests an altogether different approach to foster collaboration. He argues that “the one thing that the social enterprise sector can do is to demonstrate success. The most compelling reasons for governments to engage with something is that it’s been success somewhere else, addressing some issue which they want to address” – a motivation which underlies the Chinese government’s forays into social enterprise.

Demonstrable success may facilitate cooperation between governments and social enterprises, whose bargaining position is strengthened. Based on this argument, Dr Nicholls concludes that “the bigger problem is that we have so little data around the performance of social enterprises that we can’t prove their success most of the time. Better data, that’s what it is all about” – a conclusion mirrored in the first article in this blog series.

Leapfrogging institutions?

Throughout his analysis of social enterprises’ development, Dr Nicholls cautions that “no framework can be imposed [on the development of developing countries]”. This cautionary tone links to a broader question: Can social enterprise interventions, such as the provision of community water access in India, be seen as temporary solutions expected to prompt institutional imitation–or are they in themselves long-term solutions?

In other words, will developing countries follow the path of more developed countries in initially moving towards larger states, or will they leapfrog straight towards a model of minimal states engaging in private sector contracting?

Dr Nicholls notes that the later position is reflected in The Economist’s analysis (2012) of welfare states in developing economies, an analysis which focused on the fast growing Asian economies. “But why not also Africa? Developing countries have the opportunity to leapfrog two or three stages in welfare policy in the West [as they did for mobile technology] and go straight towards the model that we are trying to create here in the West… it is plausible…we have no evidence to say that it will not happen”. The only evidence there is – the diversity of approaches to public good provision in different Western countries – suggests that policies are shaped by countries’ economic, social, political and historical contexts.

What is clear is that new and innovative forms of service delivery are emerging: “solutions which integrate the relationship between commercial enterprises, social enterprises, multinational companies and governments in ways that don’t look familiar to us in the West”.  Social enterprises may be particularly well placed to deliver public goods “without recourse to established models and out-dated methodologies” given their flexibility and sectoral fluidity.

The (unsatisfactory) takeaway: “while such developments are not necessarily a good thing [given the examined potential problems] there is a grave danger of assuming that the model that we are familiar with is the best model…or even a model at all”.

Social enterprises’ contribution to development and its role in 20 years

Dr Nicholls concludes that “if we think that social enterprises are the vehicle by which we build national cohesion, by which we build due democratic process, by which we build proper functioning welfare states, then we are deceiving ourselves. Social enterprises will not do that and are not really trying to do that, this remains the function of social movements or political parties”.

Is there then no broader role of social enterprise in development than that of providing short-term solutions? Dr. Nicholls provides an unconventional answer ^[6]: “maybe the real point of social enterprise is to produce ethically, morally-sound, publicly-minded young individuals to eventually populate the structures of government – this may the biggest thing that social enterprise can do for development”. Whether this vision will be realised or whether brain drain from the government towards social enterprises will dominate such positive effects remains open.

In light of social enterprise’s interaction with institutions in developing countries and the potential implications for development, what will be role of social enterprise in 20 years? Dr Nicholls maintains that their future role is contingent on the trajectory of developing countries. “Social enterprise will [simply] continue to respond to failure” as they did historically in present day developed countries.

A jaundiced view of developing countries’ trajectories implies that “social enterprises’ role could become more important as inequality multiplies, the poor get left behind…and a vast underclass suffers”. On the other hand, adopting a positive view, “many enterprises will naturally disappear over time as countries’ economies grow, their politics become more stable, democracy spreads, and violence is reduced” – developments which diminish the need for social enterprises.

In the third article in this blog series, the process of social innovation which underlies the contribution of social enterprise to development will be examined in more detail.

Richard Dent recently unveiled the design for a peer to peer social networking platform for disaster relief: Crown Aid Exchange. Below he writes about how Crowd Aid Exchange could revolutionise ordinary people’s ability to help one another in an emergency situation—and this ability may be important than ever in the future. Richard has many years’ experience working with social media on environmental campaigns, and is currently completing a Masters degree in

Crowd mapping platforms such as Ushahidi and social media sites like Twitter are already being used by thousands of people during disasters. Inspired by these applications, Crowd Aid Exchange is part of a long-term vision to create an international humanitarian project that uses the full potential of social networking and mobile technology.

Crowd Aid Exchange is a peer to peer social networking application that is customised to safely connect people to each other during and after disasters. This enables individuals to share resources, find lost people and stay updated on the most critical information from response teams. Crowd Aid Exchange has a number of features that increase chances of surviving and rebuilding after disasters.

Exchange resources
Crowd Aid Exchange allows you to trade, offer aid and receive aid from anyone else on the Exchange. The system uses your location data to network you with those closest to you. An intelligent search function allows users to list posts on the exchange by locality, an individual’s needs or the needs of others. The software can be browser or app based and is capable of independent networking through direct peer to peer intranet networking. Any device with network connectivity can use Crowd Aid Exchange from laptops, Amazon Kindle and mobile phones, including older generation phones using a customised SMS platform.

Perhaps you have food but need water. Maybe you have resources but need security. Perhaps you’re trapped in a building and emergency phone lines are jammed but your GSM data service still works. Maybe you are in a position to help others? Crowd Aid Exchange will be the place to make the most of your resources.

Reputation system
One of the biggest challenges for social networking during disasters is trust. With so many vulnerable people in desperate situations, how can one trust a stranger to help? The Exchange includes a reputation system similar to eBay (or crowd surfing?). Users can earn reputation points by offering help to others, who then  verify them and add comments about their interaction. As a user’s reputation score increases, s/he is able to view more posts and create group requests to gather teams of people for larger projects, like clearing debris or rebuilding critical infrastructure.

Alert system
Information is critical during disasters. The alert system is designed to make the most of what limited signal you have. Essentially it works as an interactive information aggregator that displays feeds from emergency response teams (Red Cross/Crescent), crowd maps (Ushahidi) and social media (Twitter, Facebook). It also allows users to post alerts, which others can confirm through the ‘verify’ button, effectively increasing the quality of information on the Exchange. The Alert function can be linked to your Twitter/Facebook/Google accounts and your posts or watches will aggregate information to your feed.

Person finder
Crowd Aid Exchange allows users to post their ‘alive’ or location status or set up watches for ‘check-ins’, either on the platform or through third party crowd maps, Twitter, Facebook, Google Response and other systems. Rather than searching through a dozen or so platforms, Crowd Aid Exchange’s person finder will aggregate person finding quickly and efficiently.

A live updating survival guide
Crowd Aid Exchange includes a built in survival guide that intelligently downloads only the most appropriate information based on your location and situation. It also operates as a wiki system to allow users to update the system with local information before, during or after disaster strikes.

Keeping Crowd Aid Exchange safe
Security is at the heart of Crowd Aid Exchange. Vulnerable people are at risk from those whose social networking to identify resources and steal them. This is where the reputation system allows users to set who can see their posts by reputation, gender, age and/or locality. Users can hide their actual location, making it harder for people to find them. A built in chat system allows users to ask questions to verify identification and organize meetings in public places. Encryption between users and servers will stop anyone attempting to monitor traffic from intercepting information, whilst a central reporting server will allow access to governments checking for potential criminal activity.

Reaching people with limited access
Low bandwidth isn’t a big problem for Crowd Aid Exchange. With no images or maps to navigate, the entire interface is text based. The system is designed to avoid reloading new pages with most major functions operational from the home page. The code is being written to take advantage of recent data compression technology. Our aim is to be faster than Facebook or Twitter. Users with good bandwidth and a high spec device can turn their machine into a local server with a flick of a button speeding up access for those nearby.

Challenges
Challenges remain–specifically access to decentralized or local energy sources to power the technology from phones to networking devices. However, as renewable energy generators like solar, micro wind or even hand cranks or bicycle generation become cheaper and more accessible, this is a problem that is solvable. Projects like One Laptop per Child, and the proliferation of cheap e-readers and cheaper smart phones make this system accessible for almost everyone on the planet.

Partnerships
Whilst this project is currently being set up as a social enterprise, we acknowledge that this technology should be freely accessible to everyone. Building a global humanitarian network should be a priority for our world, in the same way as scientific endeavours like the international space station or Hadron collider. To be most effective Crowd Aid Exchange will require input from the best technologists, network engineers, academics, governments and NGOs all working together.

A Kickstarter for Crowd Aid Exchange will be launched in summer 2013.

For more information about Crowd Aid Exchange contact Richard Dent
richard@crowdaidexchange.com or rd459@cam.ac.uk