Urban Development

Social Entrepreneurship in Egypt: Challenges and Opportunities

This is the first of many multi-lingual blog post to come. It will appear in both English and Arabic.

Abduallah Abdel Qassim, 47, partner in aluminum shop making window frames (World Bank Photo Collection) High rates of youth unemployment across the Middle East and North Africa were a major catalyst for the Arab Spring revolutions. To help address this pressing issue, the Development Marketplace is preparing for a country-level competition in Egypt early next year. The proposed DM competition will focus on social entrepreneurs with projects that have a strong impact on creating sustainable job opportunities, especially for low-income and marginalized groups. The main focus of the Egypt DM will be on supporting projects in the agricultural supply chain sector.

In order to understand the bigger picture of social entrepreneurship in Egypt, I spoke with Ehaab Abdou, who recently joined the Development Marketplace team to develop the Egypt DM program. Prior to coming to the Bank Ehaab was an Ashoka Fellow and advisor for the Middle East Youth Initiative at Brookings. For Ehaab, there are three main challenges facing social entrepreneurship in the MENA region and in Egypt in particular:

How can one go to scale? This is the continuous challenge that confronts all successful social entrepreneurs. For Grupo EOZ in Mexico, there were a few key elements behind their answer: a combination of funding, partnerships and publicity, much of it due to its participation in a national TV competition called Iniciativa México.

From August to November 2010, 50 finalists from a pool of 47,000 initial applicants were featured weekly on the national TV competition.

The WB team were welcomed to Boromo (a province of Bales located two hours from Ouagadogou) by a team from Association La Voute Nubienne; a French non-governmental organization(NGO) with field offices in Burkina Faso. Their team is composed of 11 Burkinabes and a French team member, who trains masons to construct timber-free houses using the Nubian Vault technique.

A Nubian Vault house is made from locally available materials and is designed to use no wood. Because the ceiling is raised into a vault it keeps the living space significantly cooler than a typical box shaped house with a tin roof. This design originated from upper-Egypt and is a good example of south-south technology transfer.

The project, funded by the Development Marketplace, is a pilot that will test out a strategy to identify local champions and potential clients for the Nubian Vault houses.

How do you provide health care for the rural poor when medical professionals are scarce or unaffordable?

One emerging solution is to computerize medical knowledge. In 2007, Arogya Ghar captured the attention of the global health community when it was selected as one of the winners of the Development Marketplace global competition.

The process for the India Development Marketplace 2011 has been designed to be highly interactive and provide several opportunities for direct engagement between your organization and the India DM team. This process was designed with a particular focus on ensuring that we can facilitate organizations to complete the application forms – as well as seek first hand insights on what would be relevant elements of the support and technical assistance needed to grow and scale sustainable social impact models over a 2 year period.

With that in mind, the Teams from Innovation Alchemy are traveling across the 3 States of Rajasthan, Bihar and Orissa (Odisha) to meet and interact with a diverse set of social enterprises who are potentially applying for the India DM 2011 grant.

As Process Partners for the India Development Marketplace 2011, (India DM) one of the exciting things our team at Innovation Alchemy is doing is to help seek and surface interesting Social Enterprises that are working on tough social challenges, and building sustainable models to solve them.

A rigorous assessment process with a panel of independent expert assessors and jury will help the India DM 2011 program arrive at 13 winners who will each get funded with $ 50,000 over 24 months to effectively scale their SE models.

The call for entries has just been launched on December 10th 2010 and Applications can be submitted online before 23rd January 2011. As this process moves forward we will be traveling across the Target states of Bihar, Rajasthan and Orissa to meet and engage with the social impact community – to help eligible organizations apply for the competitive grant available under the India DM. More on that soon.

"Erica Hagen in her piece in Development Outreach talks of the map Kibera effort being a ' first step toward local ownership and creation of shared information.' And in that comment I feel she has hit the nail on the head.'

As an investor, you throw in the previously quite entrenched Africa perception gap and you have a very interesting situation. I would describe the situation as a potential laboratory for innovation. An incredibly youthful skew to the population (60% of Kenyans are under the age of 24) surely is also an accelerator. And hence my desire and interest of late to get on the ground, pound the pavement and see if this has actually been a catalyst for innovation.

Patrick Svenburg, co-founder of Random Hacks of Kindness, tells "Developers for Development" audience: "There's no shortage of big ideas in the world. It's the action part that's often lacking."

“Big Data” –- the billions upon trillions of bytes of digital information that are pumped into cyberspace every nanosecond –- has a single, secular mission: to keep growing. Now, software developers – the not-so-nerdy techies who keep Big Data growing at its feverish rate –- are striving to channel Big Data into the public good.

On Monday at the World Bank, developers came together with the development community -- in person and virtually through Skype video -- to figure out how to do that.

The entire "Developers for Development" can be seen on B-Span, the World Bank's webcasting service.

The afternoon event, which attracted an auditorium-ful of in-person visitors (many of them curious staffers from risk management and ICT at the World Bank) and many more via the live webcast that was offered in English, French, and Spanish, started with developers showing what's already been achieved since the first CrisisCamp about data and the public good was convened in Washington with CrisisCommons-World Bank co-sponsorship in June 2009.

The first demo was about the on-the-fly proliferation of CrisisCamps internationally in response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti in February.

Countries are rated how effective they are in human development, governance, and doing business. What if they were rated by their capacity to achieve success in all key areas of their national mission?

Ratings would measure progress in such mission "how-to's" as knowledge sharing, stakeholder participation (especially at the local level), and program results vs. objectives.

The U.N. Development Programme has singled out what it calls major successes in capacity development in 19 nations that included the Least Developed Countries of Laos, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone, Bhutan, Nepal, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. But there's no comprehensive capacity rating of all 49 LDCs, much less all 145 countries classified as developing. Even the UNDP ratings of 19 countries are based only on selected initiatives in those countries.

Mapping capacity -- horizontally across countries all the way from the national to local levels -- would, no question, be a major undertaking. But if public, private, and nonprofit development actors collaborated, especially by mobilizing advances in networking technology, the job would not seem to be insurmountable. Perhaps it could begin with the LDCs and go forward from there.

Multi-layered, continually updated capacity maps could be an important new tool especially for the poorest countries and their development donors in closing stubborn gaps toward achievement of 2015 Millennium Development Goals. The maps could also be a big help to all developing countries and donors in responding to locally diverse impacts of climate change. And that's just for starters.

We're hearing more and more about the "social entrepreneur" as the development community looks for new ways to achieve better results, especially with many developing countries struggling to meet their 2015 Millennium Development Goals and at the same time cope with destructive climate change.

Ashoka, itself a pioneer in social entrepreneurship, has a pretty good definition:

"Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change."

But maybe the definition should also emphasize a special breed of social entrepreneurs -- those who tackle major social issues by launching projects that seek to be profitable.

When Fast Company magazine in 2008 honored 45 nonprofit social entrepreneurs "who are changing the world," it also tipped its hat to 10 for-profit companies with social missions.

Trying to change the world with a project funded by development donors can be maddeningly frustrating. Even with a successful pilot, a nonprofit company is likely to encounter repeated funding snags and gaps in its quest for sustainability and replication.

Joel Selanikio was a Marketplace 2003 winner with the innovative idea to collect health-care data with hand-held computers. DataDyne, the company that pediatrician Selanikio and his partner, technologist Rose Donna, co-founded, is a not-for-profit limited liability corporation (LLC). Its personal digital assistant -- EpiSurveyor -- was an immediate success in health care in Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries. But Selanikio had to keep making the rounds of donors for each step of his growth. He was the model of the "ambitious and persistent" social entrepreneur -- but: "I got tired wearing out the knees of my trousers" making successive proposals to development donors, he said in an interview.

Urban Development

Social Entrepreneurship in Egypt: Challenges and Opportunities

What’s the Secret Sauce for Scaling Up?

Training the Burkinabe in Building Timber-Free Housing Alternatives

Disseminating Innovations in the Health Market

India DM team in Jaipur, Udaipur, Bhubaneshwar and Patna

India Development Marketplace 2011 – OPEN

The wisdom in African crowds

How 'Big Data' Can Benefit the Public Good

A Global Capacity Map -- What If?

Social Entrepreneur -- With an Emphasis on 'Entrepreneur'

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