MaGIC to strengthen programmes ensuring smoother path for impact driven enterprises
KUCHING: For 2018, Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC) is designing programmes that will ensure social or impact driven enterprises will have a higher chance of obtaining accreditation.
“What we are strengthening in 2018 are programmes that will ensure that you can qualify to be certified or accredited faster (under MaGIC’s Impact Driven Enterprise Accreditation – IDEA).
“It’s not so much that ‘you don’t qualify yet, go do what you do then come back when you are ready’, it’s more ‘you’re not there yet, let’s do something to excel it to make sure that it happens’,” MaGIC chief executive officer, Ashran Dato’ Ghazi said in response to a query from participants of a dialogue session held at MaGIC Sarawak @ Borneo 744 (B744) here yesterday.
Ashran highlighted that MaGIC has about 30 to 40 private sector corporate partners that are educating interested enterprises about procuring products and services.
However, it is important for these social or impact driven enterprises to get accreditation from MaGIC in order to connect with the centre’s network of corporate partners.
“They are saying that, ‘if MaGIC refers, then they know, if MaGIC doesn’t refer then, they don’t know whether when you say you are creating impact to the farmers and so forth, whether it is for real or not’.
“That’s why there is the accreditation.
“From a policy point of view, we are trying to drive that to be more mainstream, being at the government front, from a procuring point of view,” he insisted.
Ashran also clarified that impact driven enterprises and social entrepeneurs are subsets of each other.
“The reason why we labelled it impact-driven enterprises is we wanted all businesses to be more involved in doing social work and to not have labelling restrictions,” he explained.
“Within the community, we’ve got those identifying as social businesses and as social enterprises and we don’t want people to get too dissected because everyone’s intent is the same.
Ashran also highlighted on the crowd pledging platform ACTYVATE an initiative by National Blue Ocean Strategy ( NBOS) and recently launched by MaGIC and 1Malaysia for Youth (IM4U). This platform is is about community-centric projects whereby individuals, organisations or even social enterprises can post projects that impacts communitieson the website actyvate.my. “Get the community to support that project and then it gets green-lighted to a crowd funding exercise.
“You raise a certain amount of money, government will also come in to support that exercise,” he said. The dialogue held here yesterday was themed ‘Only One With :Ask Me Anything’.
It saw Treasury Secretary General and MaGIC chairman Tan Sri Dr Mohd Irwan Serigar Abdullah as well as MaGIC Sarawak Community and Outreach lead Amirin Arsyan sharing their ideas and opinions as well as answering queries from participants interested in MaGIC and issues that concern MaGIC or the facilities available at B744.