by Ali Weiner:
In classrooms all over Afghanistan, the Afghan Institute of learning provides education and wellness resources to 350,000 Afghan women and children each year. Its founder, Sakena Yacoobi, is a new kind of changemaker: an “innovator for the public,” a social entrepreneur.
Unlike traditional entrepreneurs, who work solely toward an economic objective, social entrepreneurs like Yacoobi work toward a triple bottom line: social change, financial sustainability, and environmental responsibility. Social entrepreneurs work on vastly different projects, but their approach is similar. “Social entrepreneurs use business tools like market analysis,” explained Tony Sheldon, a Yale School of Management professor. “They focus on expanding earned income sources and taking innovative approaches to address underlying issues.” In short, they bring private-sector methodologies out of the office and into a new arena: social change.
Drayton’s Ashoka
As innovative as their models may be, many social entrepreneurs benefit from outside help to develop their organizations. Bill Drayton, a former McKinsey and Company consultant and inventor of the phrase “social entrepreneurship,” founded Ashoka in 1980 to support people the organization deems “innovators for the public.” For the last three decades, his organization has offered a wide array of services to its fellows, including management consultancy, financial support, and networking opportunities.
Ashoka currently has more than 2,000 fellows working in over 60 countries. By most accounts, the organization has been a remarkable success, spurring the creation of many similar social entrepreneur support organizations like Echoing Green, the Skoll Foundation, and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Though they are in many ways similar to Ashoka, each organization focuses on a unique area, complementing Ashoka’s established model.
Scott Sherman, an Echoing Green fellow, founded the Transformative Action Institute, a group that teaches university students about social entrepreneurship with the intention of inspiring the next generation of changemakers. He explained that Ashoka is distinguished in its focus on individuals who “have proven themselves as social entrepreneurs and who are in the phase where they need to scale up and take their idea to the world.” While Echoing Green tends to name younger fellows, Ashoka’s selection is not based on factors like age or gender. Both policies greatly benefit female entrepreneurs who might otherwise be overlooked in their home countries.
Ashoka maintains a flexible relationship with its fellows. Shannon Howard, an Ashoka executive office staff member who works closely with Drayton, remarked to the Globalist: “We don’t ask for impact statements from our fellows or for them to do certain things. We choose them based on their success and then give them the freedom to grow their organizations.”
Supply and Demand
For such a massive program, Yacoobi’s Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) started small. during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Yacoobi worked with the International Rescue Committee to provide education to 15,000 students in the Afghan refugee camps of Peshawar, Pakistan. Upon returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, she realized that Afghan women had no educational opportunities, so she started underground schools.
“I started by going to women and asking them what they needed,” Yacoobi recalled in a thick but clear Afghan accent. “Based on what they told me they needed, I helped them. Once I started working in one village, the next village came to me by itself. Word of mouth spread around what I was doing. I kept starting small women’s learning centers to teach women how to read and write, to teach them hygiene and cooking.”
From this basic model of supply and demand, AIL grew into a massive organization with hundreds of thousands of clients and 450 female staff members. Though AIL is no longer a one-village program, it has continued to focus on the most pressing issues, adapting its services to match the community’s needs. This model is a key reason for AIL’s success.
Jamila Muhammad Akbar, manager of AIl’s Kabul office, ex plained: “At AIL, we are Afghan, too. We know how to behave around the women. We know their world, their hygiene, their family life, because it is ours, too.”
Lucia Quachey, a Ghanaian Ashoka fellow and head of the Association of Women in Development Experts (AWIDE), shares this philosophy. Quachey’s organization helps women bring themselves out of poverty through small-scale business startups in Ghana’s rural villages. Rather than teaching women new skills from scratch, Quachey said AWIDE looks at “what women already do and what they need to know in addition to what they already know” in order to run a more successful business. She, too, uses methods appropriate to her target population. “If you take people from the rural villages and try to teach them in a classroom environment, it doesn’t work,” she said. “They find it too difficult to relate to their own environment. If you train people in their own locality, it sticks.”
Training the Trainers
Social entrepreneurship’s success has not been limited to the developing world. In 1994, Ashoka fellow Angela Coleman founded Sisterhood Agenda, which has since taught more than three million women and girls of African descent about their heritage. One of her program’s alumni, Brittany Hardin, said the program’s four concentrations— sisterhood, self-knowledge, self-esteem, and self-development— changed her life. “In schools, they don’t teach you African- American history besides slavery and the civil rights movement,” Hardin said. “With Sisterhood Agenda, we learned things like African dance and the Adinkra symbols of Ghana. We took a trip to South Carolina and toured plantations. We talked about individual identity: where you come from, who you are, and how you fit in the larger scope of the world.”
Coleman watched as her students embraced their African heritage and enthusiastically shared their discoveries with family and friends. Coleman explained that she quickly realized she could widen the scope of her impact by “training the trainers.” She started selling a widely acclaimed curriculum called “A Journey Toward Womanhood” to a diverse range of organizations already working with her target population, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Alabama State University, the Africa Christian Youth Development Foundation in Nigeria, and the YWCA of Ethiopia.
The Movement of Movements
Social entrepreneurship is now taught at over 100 business schools nationwide, including Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Stanford, where it attracts young people hoping to make lasting change in a practical way. With this flood of young talent, a new culture of social entrepreneurship is on the rise, characterized by the ambition and enthusiasm of its leaders.
“In the 1950s,” Sherman remarked, “you had the civil rights movement led by young people. In the 1960s and 1970s, you had the environmental and women’s movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, movements emerged for democracy and human rights all over the world. The great movement of the new millennium is the movement of movements.”
Faced with pressing problems and armed with big ideas, social entrepreneurs are starting movements on every corner of the planet. The beauty of social entrepreneurship is that one movement, in one remote village, can soon grow to affect the lives of millions of people all over the world.
An Expanding Web
Picture a world map and consider just three movements: Yacoobi’s AIL, Quachey’s AWIDE, and Coleman’s Sisterhood Agenda. Start in the early 1990s by placing lone thumbtacks in refugee sites in Peshawar, Pakistan; in a rural village in Ghana; and in a classroom in durham, North Carolina. Fast-forward to the present day. Now, the thumbtacks will cover Afghanistan, where Yacoobi’s learning centers are educating entire communities; they will mark seven of Ghana’s ten provinces, where Quachey’s AWIDE has helped women start hundreds of small businesses; and a few hundred more will be scattered across the United States and Africa, where Coleman’s “A Journey Toward Womanhood” is being taught.
Now consider all of Ashoka, which works with 2,000 organizations. Add Echoing Green, the Skoll Foundation, the Schwab Foundation, and others like it, and that number multiplies quickly and encompasses virtually every part of the globe.
By applying the best practices of private industry to social activism, social entrepreneurs have brought health, education, and basic services to many previously untouched parts of the globe. Social entrepreneurship works through innovation, always entering new areas, trying things that have not been done before. While social entrepreneurship has proven its effectiveness in bringing massive change to much of the globe, there is still plenty it can do. The potential of the “movement of movements” seems limitless.
Ali Weiner’10 is a History and Political Science double major in Davenport College.