Poll: Canada top country for social entrepreneurs
LONDON: Canada was named the best country for business leaders seeking to tackle social problems in a global poll yesterday while the United States fell from top slot due to political uncertainty.
Australia came second in the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s second global survey on the best countries for social entrepreneurs, seeing the biggest gain of 24 places from the inaugural poll in 2016, while France came third. Mexico came last, down 15 places from 2016, but the United States was the biggest loser, plunging to 32nd place from No. 1, with the poll of about 900 social enterprise experts pointing to difficulties with government policy and access to investment.
Francois Bonnici, head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, said over the past three years there had been “some amazing gains and some ongoing challenges” for social entrepreneurs addressing issues from climate change to refugees. “Governments are recognizing that to meet their own agendas this is a group of citizens and entrepreneurs that actually want to improve society and the environment,” said Bonnici.
“But it has a slightly different flavor in each country and that government role is important (as it) can legitimize the sector in their country by creating these policies.” Business entrepreneurs globally are increasingly setting their sights on social problems with ventures that can be a commercial success while addressing problems like unemployment, homelessness, mental health, knife crime and even loneliness.
For example in South Africa social enterprise Harambee has created a ‘dating service’ to match unemployed youth with employers, while in India Project Patradya is tackling the waste problem by employing Afghan refugee women to make edible bowls. But with little data on which nations were encouraging the sector, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in partnership with Deutsche Bank, began a poll in 2016 which was repeated in 2019. Social entrepreneurs, academics, investors and support agencies in the world’s 45 biggest economies, as ranked by the World Bank, were asked their views. Iran and Saudi Arabia were dropped in 2019 as it was impossible to get the right sample.
Lack of understanding
The 2019 poll found most experts, 82 percent, said social entrepreneurship was gaining momentum in their countries - although this was down three percentage points from 2016. Canada, Indonesia and South Africa were named as the top countries where social entrepreneurship was gaining momentum, while Mexico, the United States and China saw the biggest falls. Despite this, more than half of respondents - 54 percent - said the public still did not understand what they did which was not helped by the lack of a global definition of social enterprise. Italians were most aware of their work and Poles the least. “People are becoming aware that the whole notion of social entrepreneurship is not just kumbaya,” said former Bangladeshi-U.S. investment banker Durreen Shahnaz, founder of the first social stock exchange, Impact Investment Exchange (IIX). “It really is about doing serious work and making sure that work is scalable ... There are signs the industry is maturing.” — Reuters