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Essay: Social Entrepreneurship: A Pathway To Help End Poverty in Bangladesh

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Paste your essay in here…The word Social entrepreneurship may be strange and new to most of the people, but the phenomenon is not. It has grown exponentially in recent years and had became a social, economic and cultural phenomenon. (Pless, 2012). People nowadays are joining various type of organization that are carrying out the activities which have been categorized under the word social entrepreneurship such as giving out a hand to the homeless pet that have been abandoned by their previous owner, giving food to the hungry, and much more. Dixon & Clifford (2007) suggest that social entrepreneurship is a way to build scaled diffusion of an entrepreneur’s environmental goals. It has changed the nature of today’s business environment and has brought a lot of impacts to us. It is totally different from business enterprises is because social enterprise are the entrepreneurs with a social mission. Wealth indicates an end for social entrepreneurs whereas wealth is a way of measuring value creation for business entrepreneurs. (J.G, 1998) Most of the social-purpose organizations gets profit from the fee charges for some of their services, they compete for donations and other kinds of support which is different from the business enterprise whole aim for pure profit. The rise of social issues acts as catalyst that makes social entrepreneurship more necessary in society. Social issue is classified as an issue or a topic that both influence the society it is in, and they have to be opposed by a fair number of individuals. The examples of current social issues of concern is the decline of traditional families. According to Simons (2002), 65% of all children living in families headed by a single mother are poor. Therefore, with the emergence of social enterprise, help is provided to these families such as a low cost grocery market so that the single mother could buy groceries at a cheaper price. Social enterprise is basically making profits by serving the poor.

In the past, people start up an enterprise for the goals of earning money. Their aim is to be successful, to be rich. But in 21st century, when people only focuses on the wealth and benefits of their own, the world’s environment is worsening and there appears a lot of serious problems such as poverty, health problems and much more. Hence, here comes the necessity of the helpful organizations such as NGOs and social enterprises. Their main objective is to help the part of the society that have been forgotten by others. They provide help to the helpless. In a nutshell, the business model had evolved to a social mission as goal from the aim of pure profit only. In the present scenario voluntary organizations play a crucial role in every sector especially in rural development (Lungbila, 2015). But apparently, the brilliant ages of NGOs are slowly fading away. Heyes & Martin (2015) says that NGOs are set-up by social entrepreneurs who are impact-motivated. So does social entrepreneurships. Both of them are very similar, they have the same objective: to help people in needs. But the only difference of them is the revenue model. NGOs are financially vulnerable, they basically rely on charity contributions, donations and public funding to get supports for their programs. If one day the economy of the society has gone really bad, the donations and funding are dried up, they may even have to close down their organization. But social enterprises are not. They are just like a normal business enterprise, they have a steady amount of income, takes loans forms partnerships and can even invites capital investments. Therefore, people nowadays are going for a social enterprise instead of an NGO.  

Bangladesh, is one of the world’s most densely populated country with a population around 150million people. Based on the data, 13% of them are living below the nation poverty line of US$2 per day which is around RM9 ringgit a day. Many people suffer from food shortage. Half of the children are chronically malnourished and 14% suffer from acute malnutrition. But mentioned by the World Bank, the extreme poverty rate has dropped from 44.2% in 1991 to 12.9% in 2016. According to World Bank, there is a huge chance for Bangladesh to overcome extreme poverty rate by 2030. One of the significant business enterprise that had been contributed a lot for the change in Bangladesh is the project called Grameen Bank. It is part of the important factor that helps Bangladesh to overcome poverty. The principle of Grameen Bank which means “bank of the villages” in Bengal was developed by Muhammad Yunus in 1976. According to A.Dowla (2006), the greatest challenge that Grameen faced was to gain the credit of trust from the poor men and women. Based on Yunus (2003), Sufia Begum, a lady who had borrowed about 35 cents from local moneylender that had charged her an extremely high interest around 20 percent per day. And there are more people in Jobra that are trapped in the same problem as Sufia. Therefore Yunus came up of the idea of lending them small amounts of money with low rates. It was a relieve surprise for him that every borrower had paid him back the loans and that leads to the creation of the bank – The Grameen bank. The idea of the bank is to giving out micro-loaded money to the poor people for them to begin or expand business such as making own craft and start up a small restaurant to pull them out from poverty. Once the borrowers paid back the loans, they are qualified for larger loans. In 2009, more than 128 million of the world's poorest families took microloans – up from just 7.6 million in 1997. These data significates that the 128 million of the poorest family had a capital in their hand to change their living style. It enables them to have sufficient food, enough of nutrition and even start up a business so that they could change the cash into a business that produce cash.  Therefore, social enterprise has made a significant benefit to the society- it reduced the poverty rate, increase the health condition and much more (Kazmi, 2011) There are a few successful social enterprises in Malaysia that are relieving the social problems. As an example, the ShuttleGo. This idea is creative that they provide transportation with a low cost rate for those who lives within a 5km radius from their local LRT station and are having a difficulty of transport to the stations. Since their target customers are only the ones who lives nearby the LRT station which enables them to run more often and cut down the customers’ waiting time. Therefore, it could reduce the wastage of petrol and encourage carpool and travelling by public transportations at the same time. As a conclusion, social enterprise is a platform for creative people to bring benefits to the society.

Social entrepreneurship is a process with amazing positive effects, which cannot be ignored. (S.C, CĂTĂLINA, 2013). In today’s world, people lack of place to live, do not have access to hygienic condition, lack of education and a normal life is almost a luxury to the people suffering in poor. Social entrepreneurship provides and alternative for those in need by providing access to possibilities to enables them to change their statute. Social entrepreneurship is able to make many of non for profit organization that only rely on sponsorship, donations and voluntary actions to become more financially independent. Therefore, I believe that social enterprise will become the main option for young people to start up a business in the future.

(1262 words)

References List

1. Pless, N. (2012). Social Entrepreneurship in Theory and Practice-An Introduction. Journal Of Business Ethics, 111(3), 317-320. Doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1533-x

2. Kickul, J. R., & Lyons, T. S. (2016). Understanding Social Entrepreneurship: The Relentless Pursuit of Mission in an Ever Changing World. New York: Routledge.

3. Dixon, S.E.A. and Clifford, A. (2007), Ecopreneurship – A New Approach to Managing the Triple Bottom Line. Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp 326-345.

4. J. G. (1998, October 31). The Meaning of "Social Entrepreneurship". Retrieved from https://entrepreneurship.duke.edu/news-item/the-meaning-of-social-entrepreneurship/

5. Simons, P. (2002, Mar 12). Decline of traditional family poses challenge to growing up: More mothers are working, and parents have longer workdays than ever. Edmonton Journal Retrieved from https://search-proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/docview/252899687?accountid=1252

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10. Heyes, A., & Martin, S. (2015). NGO mission design. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 119, 197-210. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.007

11. Dowla, A. (2006). In credit we trust: Building social capital by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 35(1), 102-122. doi:10.1016/j.socec.2005.12.006

12. CĂTĂLINA, Ş. C. (2013). SOCIAL ENTREPRISE- THE ENGINE OF SOCIAL ENTERPRENEURSHIP. Managerial Challenges Of The Contemporary Society, (5), 77-80.

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14. 6 Social Enterprises in Malaysia You Should Know. (2014, October 23). Retrieved from http://www.projectrenaissance.com/social/6-social-enterprises-malaysia-know

15. Grameen Bank. (2017, March 31). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank

16. Syed A., Roberts, J., & Mosley, P. (13 january 2011). Can Micro Health Insurance Reduce Poverty? Evidence From Bangladesh [Abstract]. The Journal Of Risk and Management . doi:10.1111/j.1539-6975.2010.01402.x

17. Microfinance Gateway – CGAP. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.microfinancegateway.org/library/grameen-bank-impact-costs-and-program-sustainability

18. Pitt, M. M. (2010, July 01). Household and intrahousehold impact of the Grameen Bank and similar targeted credit programs in Bangladesh. Retrieved from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/385431468740690795/Household-and-intrahousehold-impact-of-the-Grameen-Bank-and-similar-targeted-credit-programs-in-Bangladesh

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