When ? From September 2012 to July 2013
Our vision
- Solutions to change the world already exist, but they need to be scaled up to have a global impact
- Organizations like Ashoka, Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation do remarkable work to help high-potential social entrepreneurs to scale up
- But some of the most innovative social entrepreneurs lack business skills and can’t benefit from the support of these organizations: the criteria to be helped are pretty hard to meet for a thirty years old low-income Indian social entrepreneur alone…
Our value proposition
- We will help three promising social entrepreneurs in emerging countries to scale up during three missions. : that’s the core part of the project.
- We want to partner with these big foundations to avoid reinventing the wheel, and give inspiring social entrepreneurs the chance to join their network.
- We will accompany three high-potential social entrepreneurs to benefit from Ashoka/Skoll/Schwab’s support.
During our missions with the three social entrepreneurs we will accompany them in their application to benefit from Ashoka/Skoll/Schwab’s support. Depending on their needs and their skills, it should consist in:
- Defining their Scale Up strategy with them
- Working on their specific challenges to scale up : for example, formalizing their business model and/or business plan, assessing their social impact with their community… We will organize MakeSense HoldUps, one in France and one in their community, to find creative ideas to help them solving their challenges.
- Linking them with organizations (local and international) that can help them to succeed in the scaling up : it should be investors, big corporations or NGOs. We will organize MeetUps - event with all the Changemakers of the area, during which they brainstorm on how they can partner together, share their experience and tips to learn from each other. The ultimate goal is to accelerate social change in their ecosystem.
What kind of social entrepreneurs do we target?
The social entrepreneurs we target for our missions are highly committed entrepreneurs with innovative and promising ideas to solve an urgent social need, but they lack the business skills needed to scale up their solution. We will focus on the areas of food and water, because these are the most urgent social needs people have. Food and water are the first two things people must have to survive, and in today’s world:
- 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water (Unicef, 2010)
- 925 million people in the world are malnourished (FAO, 2010)
If social entrepreneurs can find innovative solutions to give access to food and water to the most underprivileged populations while being financially sustainable, we can assume social entrepreneurs should find solutions to every other social need in the planet while being financially sustainable.
