The Need for Tough Love: Social Enterprise and Burmese Charity

The Social Enterprise Symposium initiated by the British Council in Yangon where I facilitated one of the panel discussions last week, was well attended and showed significant development of interest in social enterprise since the organisation first held a seminar in 2012 where I was part of the earliest group of business owners interacting with the social entrepreneurship scene. 

Throughout the symposium there emerged two extremes: The “Micky Mouse SEs” and “Scalability Fanatics”.    Within the Micky Mouse camp, there are CSOs/NGOs who have run out of funding and are now making desperate attempts to position themselves as SEs to get more funding in the pretext of “being sustainable.”  The remaining ‘do-gooders’ typically include groups of young people who work towards street children education or similar noble causes but without much business planning.

On the other end were the scalability fanatics. The symposium happened to have sales representatives attending for the concept of social franchising as a growth toolkit.  The panel experts beautifully responded to the questioner (who was promoting their social franchise gig in the form of a question) that the only valid purpose to scale up a social enterprise should be for impact and not for growth.  During a break, I had a chat with a senior gentleman from Scotland (big shot SE guy) and he commented “when people talk about social franchising, they are clueless about franchising”.  With those words of wisdom, we went to the panel discussion on capacity building of SEs, a session I facilitated and reported to the general audience later on (as four specialist sessions were run in parallel). 

Comparisons are drawn between the social enterprise movement and the charitable nature of the Burmese people.  The people of Myanmar are known for generosity and Myanmar was recently ranked number one for charitable giving (World Giving Index by Charities Aid Foundation, 2015). With the on-going reforms in the country, there is a general intention to do good by both private players and government actors in poverty reduction and sustainable development. 

This charitable nature can be fertile grounds for three in-country possibilities:

1) Additional funding to traditional development partners – promising SMEs and SEs require investment and cash infusion at below USD200k market (ideally around USD50k).  A seed capital fund(s) could be created by donations. 

2) Recruitment: top talent are more likely to work at positions where their efforts are seen to benefit the society and contribute towards positive social change and not just the bottom line of the organisations they work for. 

3) SE start-ups: some talented do-gooders may not be attracted to the arcane concept of pure commercial entrepreneurship and they may be more likely to set up SEs (otherwise may work indefinitely in the NGO space).  But these folks tend to learn the hard way that social entrepreneurship cannot escape from entrepreneurship – not one bit.

My panel members all agreed that the importance of the idea is overrated but rather the focus should be on the individual or individuals (teams) setting up the SE. It was stressed that Myanmar-based social entrepreneurs need to grow beyond the discussion of legal formats to creating measureable impact.  Supporters of the SEs should become more stringent and make the founders think of impact and sustainability and not just beautiful presentations filled with emotions.  Tough love is needed.

This blog is part of the October 2016 series on Exploring the social enterprise landscape, in partnership with the World Bank Group and endeva. Read the whole series for insight and opinion on policy, business models and definitions from social entrepreneurs, policy makers and facilitators around the world.