As the popularity of social entrepreneurship rises, we can see many social entrepreneurs to be successful with their projects. A social entrepreneurs are people who try to pursue new actions that have the potential to solve community-based problems. They focus rather on making a social impact than making a profit. For more information you can read our previous article here. We would like to introduce you some of the most famous foreign social entrepreneurship examples.
Ashoka was founded by Bill Drayton. It’s impossible to talk about success of social entrepreneurship without mentioning the person of Bill Drayton and his organisation. He is recognised as the father of whole concept and is responsible for bringing social entrepreneurship to the mainstream of these days. Ashoka is taking an approach to find and support many social entrepreneurs globally in order to create a worldwide team of people with the goal of making a social impact in their societies. Up to this day Ashoka helped more than 2100 individuals in 73 countries.
After a trip to Argentina, where Blake Mycoskie witnessed the poverty of local children and their difficult life without shoes, he founded his own shoe company with its typical design. He also invented and successfully implemented the “One-For-One” campaign, which means for every pair of shoes purchased from his company, he pledged to donate another to the people in need. The campaign then expanded to support either water, eyewear, safe births and anti-bullying programs. TOMS shoes has achieved to donate more than 60 million pairs of shoes, to help 780 000 people to restore their eyesight and to provide 772 000 weeks of safe water for many people.
Audrey Cheng was a global health student and journalist when she was working in Kenya with Savannah Fund. During her stay in Africa, Audrey was looking for software developers to deliver some project for their work. But she quickly realized that it would be pretty difficult to find someone because of high unemployment rates and small number of qualified software developers. She managed to found Moringa School in order to provide quality education in computer science especially software development. Their students can increase their income by 350 % with a 100 % placement rate.
Scott Harrison decided to dedicate his whole life to charity right after spending some time in Liberia, West Africa. He established a non-profit company with a vision to provide safe, drinkable water to countries, where they deal with a lack of it. At the start of 2020 Charity: Water helped over 10 million people in 26 countries with its projects. He also managed to use all of its profits to fund current and future water projects. Even though it seems like a very unmanageable business plan, Scott is one of the most successful social entrepreneurs in the world inspiring many others to do so.
Uniqueness of this bank established by professor Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983 lies in awareness that also poor people should have access to basic bank services. Its mission is to provide small loans to local farmers and workers to help them become financially stable and self-sufficient without requirements of some warranty from its debtors. On top of that Grameen Bank has managed to gain an income of 10 million dollars and Muhammad Yunus was awarded with Nobel prize thanks to his project. Right now, Grameen Bank has around 10 million customers with 97% of them being women.
Malala Fund is named after Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. It was founded by her and Ziauddin Yousafzai in Pakistan. Malala Fund is breaking down barriers that hold many girls back, with more than 130 million still with no rights or opportunities for education. Malala Fund was born with a goal to empower girls and women by widening their access to education, to invest in local education activists and to advocate to hold leaders accountable.
Do you know somebody with a big social impact on his/her community? Do you think that we forget some other great social entrepreneurs? Contact us and we will be very glad to publish their stories too.