Strive For Economic Progress Amid Political Chaos

I believe recent announcement on Palestinian Venture Fund will fundamentally challenge and gradually shift our perception on private investment. Political stability has always featured prominently in investment decision by venture funds. Global institutions and governments have always taken the lead in placing risky investment in conflict-ridden and poor regions as a matter of urgency and necessity.

I think similar initiatives will continue to challenge the belief that economic progress can only come after political stability. No doubt that this private-sector led effort is partly driven by economic incentives, and there is no way to hope that it can settle the controversial territorial disputes. Jury is still out for whether or not this fund will sufficiently kick-start meaningful economic progress, and how the fund will be distributed efficiently. But the certainty is that this venture fund will trigger the much needed wave of optimism and economic activities, hopefully it will lead to more private investment and act as the precursor to greater political stability. Kudos to this initiative.

How Far Can For-Profit Model Support Social Innovation?

When we assess social innovation, the major yardstick is the significance level of scale and replication achieved. No doubt the more open we are in the process of sharing information and insight, the better and quicker we are in making progress in social innovation. This is exactly the trend we are observing right now among social enterprise start-ups.

But this practice will be difficult to for-profit social enterprises where their social mission strategy is inherently integrated into their business strategy. The downside is potentially limiting social innovation for not being able to openly share as much. The core challenge is to differentiate key information and share as much as possible to support social innovation but without compromising business competitiveness. It is absolutely vital to manage these conflicting interests in for-profit model.

It does not make sense to claim “sorry, we can't share proprietary information” simply because we have business interests to protect when there is a real opportunity to replicate social impact . The losers will be socially-disadvantaged individuals who we claim to serve.

Assessing Community Empowerment in Social Impact

When it comes to assessment of social impact, economic metrics come to the top of mind without a doubt. Even if we talk about more intangible aspects of social impact such as improving abilities to perform various jobs or providing for family needs, raise of income level acts as the precursor that also leads to other aspects of social development.

There is a great of interest right now among key stakeholders in social entrepreneurship to talk about assessing intangible social impact. I think community empowerment is at the center of it.

We know what individual empowerment can do, it breaks cycle of poverty and gives the poor choices to make. The next wave of social development occurs when individual recipients of assistance turn into providers within the community. It is not just about the informal financial assistance to fellow community members, job creation through small-scale businesses or encouragement that they provide to community members to take up new challenges in improving living condition, but it is also a major breakthrough in self belief that they can do better to help others beyond self and family survival.

This positive chain reaction is critical to enable greater progress toward financial independence and sustainability. As much as we stress the significance of scaling social enterprises, I believe the underlying aspect is actually scaling and allowing community empowerment to thrive. It is something that we should not miss in social impact assessment.