Social Entrepreneurs Make Change Happen

By Betsy Merzenich, Give2Asia

In the course of our work at Give2Asia, we come across dynamic leaders of organizations working for social change. We've had the opportunity to introduce these individuals to donors and to partners such as the Skoll Foundation, which help to further their work and expand their impact by bringing their innovation into other communities. Here are stories of some of these leaders, and we'll be sharing more again soon.

Like many young tourists from Europe, Sebastien Marot arrived in Cambodia in the early 1990s with a backpack and a dream of continuing on to find work in Tokyo, Japan. What he found when he arrived in Phnom Penh altered the direction of his life, and his subsequent work as a social entrepreneur has improved life for hundreds of thousands of children and family members.

The capitol city of Cambodia, ravaged by years of conflict, revealed to Sebastien a community with little internal structure, thousands of children struggling daily for survival, and seemingly ineffective efforts by foreign NGOs to help. While exiting a restaurant one night, Sebastien was struck by the contrast of a shiny black Mercedes passing a group of homeless children who slept on flattened cardboard boxes at the edge of the road. Compelled to help, he began bringing food to these street children. But after several days of this, he discovered he was one of many tourists feeding street children and effectively keeping them well fed and on the streets.

With support from two traveling companions, he decided to stay in Cambodia for several months to create a drop-in center for children with services to bring them in from the streets. Nearly 15 years later, his drop-in center – now run by local Cambodians within the community – is part of Friends International, the network Sebastian created to establish similar support systems for displaced children in countries like Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia. Sebastien’s network provides basic education, vocational training, work in for-profit businesses, and many other services to help homeless children and young adults who want to create new opportunities for themselves. In addition, his partnerships with local governments and other NGOs have formed an effective safety net for those at risk of drug addiction, human trafficking and other abuses.

In 2007, the Skoll Foundation in the United States became another in a list of organizations to recognize Sebastien’s work. The Skoll Foundation is a leading proponent globally of social entrepreneurs. These are people who demonstrate the leadership and ability to take an idea beyond the scale of one problem in one location. Like any other entrepreneur, they must be willing to take risks and build something new, and ultimately create a model for a social venture that can be replicated to serve many communities.

There is a diversity of social entrepreneurs across Asia working on issues large and small in every country of Asia. They are bringing innovation and commitment to a multitude of social issues and creating new systems that can be used to have a global impact. For example:

Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, a 2008 Skoll winner, has created a new model for combating human trafficking in the Philippines. To date her organization, the Visayan Forum Foundation, is responsible for rescuing over 30,000 girls and boys in a country ideal for traffickers looking for ports that ship people to Korea, Thailand, Singapore, China and elsewhere. Originally a political prisoner during the Marcos regime, Cecilia was locked up with her husband and children until the Marcos family was overthrown. She thought she knew what hardship was, but says she quickly realized that the enslavement of Filipino girls and boys for sex and labor was far worse than anything she and her family had endured. Cecilia has taken a business approach to the problem of human trafficking: Her goal is to block all trade routes and make the business of trafficking in the Philippines cost prohibitive.

Lucky, Dicky, and Nicky Chhetri launched Empowering Women of Nepal (EWN) to create livelihood opportunities for women in the trekking industry in Nepal.  These sisters rebelled against male-dominated cultural norms, and created a project to prepare women for employment as adventure trekking guides, a career path that was not previously accessible to them.  Their organization provides a quality vocation training program to arm women from villages all across Nepal with practical trekking knowledge and skills, ecological awareness, and literacy. The participants not only gain confidence and better livelihood opportunities, but are also able to improve their status in the eyes of the Nepali society. 

Ahmad Bahruddin founded Qaryah Tayyibah Farmers Association in Indonesia to radically improve educational access and quality for disadvantaged children. In poor communities throughout the country, the costs of public education are high and the quality is low. Ahmad envisioned and pioneered a new educational model, in which local community members come together to create alternative schools where children learn according to their interests and needs.  Micro-enterprises at the school provide real life experience to students in business planning and management and provide income to support school operations.

Comments

[Penda]

I beleive that social entrepreneurship is ground breaking ways of saving lives at the time and Mr Skoll's foundation is a good exemple of that.

Good Job