So what is social entrepreneurship? It's a question I'm asked often and one I'm expected to have an answer for as I work here at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in social entrepreneurship. But my answer is long and rambling and I notice people looking at their watches and high-tailing it to the exit side. halfway through. And this was the motivation behind writing the book, is to really get an understanding as to what social entrepreneurship is in South Africa, to transform it from this intangible concept into a noun, something you can see, feel, and touch.
I'd like to share a story with you and it's a story of Ashley. Ashley's my guy at the traffic light of the robot. Ash and I chat on my commute home from work and I give Ashley money when I have it but then understanding some of the theories of development I know that a predictable source of income is one of the best ways you can enable someone to take that first step up, to take that first step up out of their circumstances. And so I started to give Ash a regular amount of money every Monday. But it was in writing the book that I realized I was answering a lot of the questions I had, but I wasn't actually leaving completely fulfilled because I was being left with more questions.
And the big question that was sitting with me was, who is benefiting from this relationship between Ashley and I? Because sure, Ash gets money, and I'm sure he can go and afford a box of cigarettes if that's what he wants to buy. But I would drive away every time with a deep sense of goodwill, a deep confidence in my humanity. a quiet knowledge that I am a good person. Am I a good person?
Am I a good person? The act of giving is very anchored in benevolence. And benevolence means deliberate goodwill.
Its opposite is malevolence, deliberate ill will. The thing about when I was being benevolent, this act of kindness, I realized that I was perpetuating a divide that we are urgently trying to eradicate in South Africa, and that is the divide of have and have not. In giving to Ashley, I'm a have, he is a have not. I'm fortunate, he's less fortunate, privileged, less privileged.
But the thing about this flow of events is that benevolence underpins our charity, and charity underpins our social development. And I ask myself, are we deliberately, inadvertently, but still, perpetuating the divide of inequality rather than bridging it through our social development? This is South Africa.
This is a picture taken in Kaiserslautern that very starkly shows us what our inequality is, what the difference is between the have and the have-not. But we can look at the statistics to back this up. There's a lovely tool called the Global Competitiveness Index, which gives you a snapshot of the global competitiveness index. of your country and allows you to compare it to a whole lot of others, the latest one 140 other countries. And South Africa does so well in our financial indicators.
We lead in things like the working of our corporate boards, the regulation of our securities exchanges, our ability to access equity financing. We lead the index. But what happens at the bottom? Social development. Bottom of the index for the quality of our maths and science education, bottom of the index for the cooperation that exists in our labor market, and leading in the bottom ranks in terms of our health indicators, the impact of HIV and TB.
What the index tells us is that we are, in theory, doing things great. Great financial institutions underpin a great economy. Economic growth broadens our middle class.
The middle class naturally uplifts people out of poverty. It's a narrative we... here. But the thing that's happening in South Africa is that our social development is so weak, it's imploding our economic development.
We can't rely on the one to lead the other. The economy cannot be solely responsible. for uplifting the complexity of social development that is required in South Africa. If you have any doubts as to how awful our social development is, look to the Human Development Index of 2014. The Human Development Index is a lovely index.
It kind of tracks the environment that your country creates that allows you to develop your social development. allows you to thrive. So, how are you able to gain knowledge because you have access to great education?
What is your ability to lead a long life because you have access to great healthcare? And the one that I particularly love is, what is your ability to act on opportunity because you have access to disposable income? In 2014, South Africa shared a rank with Syria and was one above Iraq.
This is a picture of Syria taken in January of 2014. The citizens of this country share the same quality of life as the citizens of ours. We cannot continue to expect the economic sector to uplift our social development. We urgently need to look at how we create social opportunities for all.
I would argue that benevolence in perpetuating the inequality is not where we should be looking to for answers, but that the answer, the counter to benevolence, is actually a word that is deeply tainted with abuse, it's deeply tainted with exploitation, and that word is profit. Profit is a great equalizer. When you start introducing profit into social development, you shift the benevolence to a relationship of choice. I choose to access the service you're offering me, not I have to access the service.
you're offering me because it's free. You're giving it to me. When we look at the for-profit and not-for-profit landscape, the profit landscape in South Africa, there are these two polar sides, these polar opposite sides of the spectrum. The for-profit organizations is business. We know it well.
They earn an income, they earn a profit. The relationship between customer and corporate is decided largely by us. I choose to consume. On the other side is the not-for-profit. The not-for-profit organizations are our charity organizations.
The relationship there is one of donor and beneficiary. The for-profit side of the spectrum generates economic value. The not-for-profit side of the spectrum generates social value.
The social value is underpinned by benevolence. in the Netherlands. And I ask you, but what's happening in the middle?
Why are we relying on two opposite ends of the spectrum to deliver such complexity as social and economic development? What happens in between those two pillars? And this is the answer that I always struggle to provide, because this is the world of social entrepreneurship.
This is why there's no definition for social entrepreneurship, because it doesn't sit neatly in a box. It sits across a spectrum. You will meet lots of social entrepreneurs online, you will meet them through your TED talks.
The one thing you will notice is that they are all different, and they all identify differently, some more with for-profit organizations, others with not-for-profit organizations. So if I can't give you a definition of social entrepreneurship, and that really was one of the objectives I was hoping to get in writing the book The Disruptors, if I can't give you a definition, what can I give you? So I have three lessons, three lessons. not four, three, that really I found the enlightening side of this journey into understanding this complexity of social enterprise.
The first is that our social entrepreneurs do not, and I like to repeat that, they do not exist to change the world. In fact, develop a deep allergy for people who profess to change the world because that is an approach that is anchored in benevolence because who whose world are you changing and to what? Are you imposing your view of how the world should be versus what that person's view should be?
Our social entrepreneurs instead recognize that they are enablers, they're catalysts of change. They make things happen that encourage others to take the lead. The second is really an answer to a question that I'm often asked in the classroom, which is, well, how much should a social entrepreneur earn if you're going to introduce profit into the equation?
then it's endless. Should a social entrepreneur be able to afford a Ferrari, drive a Ferrari, a helicopter, a yacht? And again, if we're going to start looking at what happens in the middle of the spectrum, we need to reframe our questions because they don't stay the same. Our social entrepreneurs are not driven by the financial rewards of consumerism. Yes, of course, they want to send their kids to good schools, they want to be able to travel and afford a decent life.
But they are not motivated by excess, and they have a deep... sense of value and they see success in both social and economic rewards, in social and economic change. The last point is really an observation that I've picked up over a fair amount of time trying to understand this crazy world of social entrepreneurship and that is I really believe our social entrepreneurs are our super entrepreneurs.
As the global economy continues to be constrained and looks like it will be constrained for a very long time, it's our social entrepreneurs that we can learn from. Because let's be honest, these are folk who deliver goods and services in highly constrained markets. They are, after all, the people who are the most important who are taking the best that business has to offer, its focus on accountability, its focus on profit, and balancing that with the best that civil society has to offer, its focus on social value and being able to operate in complex environments. Social entrepreneurs operate in places where business just does not even see because they don't see opportunity.
There is so much that we can learn from them about thriving in constraint and also about where do we see opportunity. Because where many people see negativity, those indicators on health, indicators on education, our social entrepreneurs actually see opportunity. They see opportunity not purely in how much money can I make, but in what is the social value that I can deliver.
if I enact or act on this opportunity. So they are the folk who see those health indicators on the Global Competitiveness Index and say, you know what, I'm going to set up a low-cost, high-quality, highly accessible clinic in communities where people struggle to access healthcare. They're the folk who are shifting that serious statistic.
Two myths about social entrepreneurship. The first is that social entrepreneurs run very small, survivalist organizations that are very driven by them. This is not the case.
Our social enterprises... are often large, they're often global, and you will meet different people who run organizations with a global footprint and multi-million rand, multi-million dollar budgets. The second is that social entrepreneurship is not new.
This is something that we seem to have stumbled across. We seem to think it's this new amazing thing. It's not new.
We kind of forgot about it in the 70s when we started to focus on big business and big society. We look no further than an organization like Unilever, which started off as Lever Brothers. But the founder was sitting watching women washing clothes in a stream. It was cold, it's miserable, it's in the UK. And he was, what can I do to improve the lives of these women?
And being a chemist, he came up with the concept of lathering soap. And that is sunlight soap, sunlight soap being the cornerstone of the Unilever empire today. The opportunity is spotted in the society by looking at how we interact with each other differently.
The second example is just a lovely story that I enjoy, but this is from the 1790s, where two Scottish clergymen were appalled by the destitution that their colleagues found themselves in. So when clergy died, their families were left destitute because women weren't allowed to work. They couldn't earn.
and so families would end up on the streets. So Webster and Wallace, who apparently loved a good glass of wine, and I imagine a lot of this happened in the pub, sat down and they worked out a fund that the clergy could contribute to during their lifetimes that would pay out on their death. Does this sound familiar? This is insurance. The start of the massive insurance industry sits in how people are viewing their world.
It's also not a Western or European concept. We look no further than our stockfells and our cooperatives to see how communities band together to generate social and economic profit for themselves. These are the principles of social entrepreneurship.
Cooperatives and stockfells are age-old principles in South Africa. This is not a new concept. So what am I asking of you? Am I asking you to stop giving? I'm not asking you to stop giving to charity anymore than I'm asking you to stop shopping at your local for-profit.
You need the opposite ends of the spectrum to anchor the work in social and economic change. But what I am asking is that we start exploring this middle. Because this is the disruption. We currently regard our social entrepreneurs as disruptors. But the only reason that they're disruptive is because we don't see this middle as existing.
Let's turn them into a norm. One of the first things that we can do is to recognize social enterprises as organizations, as they've done in the UK and the US. Because if we want to fast-track change in South Africa, if we really want to accelerate our social development, if we want to accelerate our economic development, stop that quiet implosion of the two as they continue to pull each other apart, we need to focus on the middle.
So the question I'm leaving you with is not what is social entrepreneurship? It's rather, what is it that we can do to encourage social entrepreneurship in South Africa, to make it thrive, so that we can fast track and accelerate our social and our economic change? Thank you.