KEYNOTE LECTURE 1

What can the Global South teach us about social enterprise?Diane Holt, University of Exeter

The Global South and (Hybrid) Social

Enterprises

Professor Diane HoltEssex Business SchoolUniversity of Essex (UK)dholt@essex.ac.uk

The Global South and Social (Hybrid

Enterprises)

Or to put it another way…

context matters!

Themes of my work

• hybrid (social) enterprises especially for poverty alleviation, sustainable development, inclusive growth

• Informal and sustainable supply chains

• The nature and boundaries of the informal economy

• Research on green/sustainable businesses

• Innovation for resilience especially for the informal economy

The Trickle Out Africa Project

• Study of social and environmental enterprises in East and Southern Africa

• Over 4000 listed including NGOs, Fairtrade, social, hybrids

• Quantitative survey and 20 qualitative case studies

• Fieldwork in Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa

• Covers 19 countries

• www.trickleout.net

• 24 weeks of immersive fieldwork 2011-2013 + Ongoing

• 4000+ organisations in Trickle Africa Out directory 19 countries

• 20 African case studies including 300+ interviews and focus groups across Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique, S Africa

• 120 interviews with informal economy entrepreneurs (South African + Kenya) + visits to incubation hubs in SA (2015), Solar IT labs + informal businesses 2016

• Producer communities (mostly women/elderly) in Kenya – field experiments

Conservation agriculture and innovation for resilience in the informal economy (Kenya)

• October 2016 – training session with women/ made planters with funds.• Given seed, fertiliser, planter, pesticide etc in Jan 17• Late Summer 2017 soil samples taken in both (including DNA)• Feedback on experience – individual farm interviews

• data on CA• data on solar cooker use• data on water ponds

• December 2017 – set up for next yr/ additional data

The Global South – the context

• Africa, Latin America, and the developing countries in Asia), "developing countries," "less developed countries," and "less developed regions.“

• Human Development Index - Global North 64 countries which have a high HDI (mostly North of the 30th northern parallel), Remainder belong to Global South.

• See Concepts of the Global South –Voices from around the world Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, Germany – http://gssc.uni-koeln.de/node/452

• The DAC list (OECD)

Focusing in on SSA…So what’s different… LOTS• Not everyone is ‘poor’

• Actually poverty is both relative and absolute (see Krishna’s levels of progress and self-perceptions of poverty)

• The things they worry and think about are different (the public sphere) (i.e. they are not the issues most of concerns of those in Global North) Barkemeyer et al 2013

• Context/Countries are ‘different’• Different industries (agriculture/industry mix)• Different legal systems• Different ethnic groups• Different geographies (landlocked/coastal)• Different climatic zones.

But so are countries in global north!

Institutional differences

Informal economy differences

Poverty differences• One illness away• Safety nets

Envisaging the climb out of poverty (after

Krishna, 2010)

Is there a definition?

• definitional characteristics of a social enterprise remain contested (e.g. Rivera-Santos et al., 2015).

• due to variability in the business models emerging in diverse local contexts to address particular development needs

• Emerging discourse on hybrid social enterprises (after Battilana & Lee, 2014; Doherty et al., 2014; Haigh et al., 2015; Holt & Littlewood, 2015), operate under varied designations, but share three common characteristics.

• Utilise some element of trading or enterprise-based activity in their income generation model;

• Place the achievement of their social and/or environmental mission at the heart of their business model and strategies; and

• May take some profit, they ‘sacrifice’ profit maximisation and reinvest some if not all of their surpluses in achieving their core social and/or environmental mission.

Defining SEs….Why we like boxes!

Social Enterprises/ Hybrids

• exist at the interface between non-profit and for-profit business models.

• adopt a mission-driven business ethos associated with addressing a social and/or environmental goal, giving primacy to that mission over their economic returns

• (Holt and Littlewood, 2015 California Management Review)

Key Take Awaysfrom HSE in SSA

• Institutional differences and what this means for HSE• Forget the ‘label’ think about the impact

• Think about institutions at multiple intersecting levels• Regulatory, Normative, Cultural-Cognitive

• The importance of the informal economy in the equation• (‘dual’ economies)

• It isn't going away…

• The collision of intersectionalities

• The role of social innovation• social franchising, SI reproduction in subsistence contexts and the

problems with the ‘IP’ of some ideas

Institutions: CONTEXT!

• Regulatory (e.g. legal structures, access to capital, microcredit, inheritance laws, and property ownership)

• Normative (community norms, beliefs systems, ethnicity, cultural factors, and social role)

• cognitive system (e.g. level of education, training, and technological literacy).

See amine and staub (2009) - women entrepreneurs in SSAIn SSA- The boundaries of the boxes! (Kenya etc)- Kinship ties (ethnicity)/ Ubuntu? - The role of the family and family obligations- Engaging talent in development- The issues of thinks like asset

lock/governance structures/non-profit status when in SSA

Envisaging Poverty – Stages

of Progress (after Krishna,

2010)

Why does how you are perceived matter?

Institutional voids, gaps, differences

– the opportunity ‘space’

Differences lead to different types of bridges and different opportunities

The Informal Economy

• those who are self-employed working under informal means” • “unregistered but derive income from the production of legal

goods and services” • “unprotected”• Many Social/Environmental enterprises/ CSR projects

engaging with the informal• 87% of Kenyan (firms and individuals) purchase goods and

services from predominantly informal enterprises (Kapila, 2006)

• In Sub-Saharan Africa 75% of non-agricultural employment, 61% of urban employment and up to 92% of new jobs (Commission for Africa 2005), with 70% of the world’s population living in BoP ‘markets’ (Kiss et al., 2012)

• untaxed/unregulated sectors in developing nations it is socially resilient institution

Characteristics to think about!

• Starting place of many hybrid enterprises

• Township communities – essentially a dual economy/ elsewhere like Kenya IE enduring resilient social institution

• Identity as a informal businesses• Informal business portfolios – risk

mitigation • Growth is not getting bigger its about

getting more ‘arms’

The Informal Economy (Nexus)

The informal/formal nexus

Intersectionalities• Multiple exclusions

• Added complexity

• Compounding contingencies

• Gender and rural and literacy

Source: UN Women-http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw/women-in-informal-economy

Cycles of economic and political poverty – after Martinussen

(1997)

“they were not really into saving that much, because the money they get from the papyrus is so little, so you find that if they don’t even get 100 shillings, they spend it to household budget, then the only thing remaining is, like, 20 shillings or ten, and that means you cannot only just put it in a tin somewhere. So it’s not much saving” (Interview with representative of local NGO)

Very successful in Kenya – HIGH mobile phone penetration and good infrastructure for this

South Africa- less successful – why?

Asking questions about innovation + social innovation

Social Innovationviewed as goods, services, markets or forms of production and employment (co-operative or franchises), have at their essence the goal of addressing social or environmental needs (TEPSIE, 2015; The Young Foundation, 2012).

• social franchisng• Innovation diffusion and

production• The role of ‘copying’ in SSA

Professor Diane Holt Essex Business School University of Essex, UK

dholt@essex.ac.ukwww.essex.ac.uk/people/dholt

www.trickleout.nethttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Diane_Holt