Social Entrepreneurship and Communication for Development and Social Change

This article argues that social entrepreneurship has not yet been adequately defined even though it is increasingly being used in social change/development practice. Muhammad Yunus, creator of the Grameen Bank and microlending, and Bill Drayton, founder of the global change agency Ashoka, have practiced social change through social entrepreneurship for more than 30 years. Increasingly, the development community has been adopting many of its practices. The basic process of social entrepreneurship involves: defining a social goal for the solution of a serious problem; innovation in solving the problem; ability to expand the organization to serve large numbers of people (scaling up); focusing on the social bottom line with empirical evidence (impact evaluation). Three cases are briefly reviewed to illustrate this process. Finally the article examines how these practices might help Communication for Development (C4D) to better adapt its own practices in achieving real change with people.