Published in Aracruz News, No 28, April 2004
Enter the Social Entrepreneurs
by John Elkington
I was lucky to get involved in environmentalism early, in the 1960s, and in sustainable development during the 1980s. As a result, I have travelled continuously for decades. But my visit to Aracruz this April was my first-ever visit to South America in general - and to Brazil in particular. Even so, I have met and been impressed by a number of Brazilians, including some SustainAbility has worked alongside at Instituto Ethos and Atitude.
But the Brazilian who has most impressed me to date is Fabio Rosa. He has pioneered systems to provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of poor rural Brazilians. His Palmares Project established the standard for low-cost electricity transmission, cutting costs to consumers by more than 90 percent. Today, Rosa is spreading 'agro-electric' solutions combining photo-voltaic solar energy, electric fencing, and improved farming and grazing systems to combat poverty, land degradation and global warming.
I met Rosa this year at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit meeting (www.weforum.org). This annual event pulls together several thousand leaders from the worlds of politics, government, business and civil society to debate the major issues of the day. The theme of this year's event was 'Partnerships for Security and Prosperity'. Former US President Bill Clinton helped launch the summit with a powerful speech calling for changes in the global system to help tackle the growing range of economic, social and environmental challenges the world increasingly faces.
And his case for change was greatly strengthened by the launch of the WEF Global Governance Initiative's first annual report . The report turned out to be surprisingly critical of current efforts to tackle the priority issues identified at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, in the form of the 'Millennium Development Goals'. The report came up with the following report card: peace and security (3 out of 10), poverty (4), hunger (3), education (3), health (4), environment (3) and human rights (3). These are worryingly poor results.
So where will the necessary 'system changes' come from? Some argue that only government can work this magic. Others believe that major corporations or the financial markets will come up with the answers. The WEF events have looked at all these options, and more, but there is also growing interest in the potential of social entrepreneurs to drive change.
The reason that Fabio Rosa and other social entrepreneurs were now working the corridors of the 2004 Forum summit was that they have been honoured by the Schwab Foundation for Social Enterprise (www.schwabfound.org). Created by WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde, the Foundation identifies, celebrates and networks social entrepreneurs around the world. One benefit of the connection is that the social entrepreneurs get to meet and talk to world leaders, from President Lula to Bill Gates.
Most of our work has been with large companies, including now Microsoft, which potentially have a great deal of leverage once they switch on to the need for change. But there is a limit to what even the biggest companies can achieve within today's market systems. So I am fascinated by the potential of the growing number of social entrepreneurs tackling such issues as environmental protection, family planning, the empowerment of women, fair trade, food security, the homeless, HIV/AIDS orphans and youth development.
Where markets fail, as they do in relation to many such issues,
social entrepreneurs are working on new thinking, technology and business
models to do the previously undoable. The real question is how we can launch
the necessary 'top-down' changes to our national and international market
systems to help social entrepreneurs scale up their 'bottom-up' activities?
Only if we are prepared to throw our political and economic weight behind
such pioneers will we see evidence of real progress in future WEF Global Governance
Initiative surveys.