Social Entrepreneurship | Andrew Kuper | Big Think

Social Entrepreneurship

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The president of LeapFrog Investments discusses the latest trends in the vast movement known as social entrepreneurship.

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Andrew Kuper:

LeapFrog is the world’s first investment fund to focus on the insurance needs of low-income and financially excluded people. Launched by President Clinton and hailed by The Wall Street Journal and Private Equity International, LeapFrog has opened a new frontier for social investment and microfinance. Andy founded LeapFrog in January 2007, inspired by his extensive experience enabling entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and then co-built the firm with a team of former CEOs and pioneers in emerging markets insurance. Andy is a former Managing Director of Ashoka, which has financed and connected 2000 social entrepreneurs in over 60 countries. He worked with both Grameen and BRAC, the world's largest microfinance institutions, to market their social ventures. He also co-founded Kuper Research, which designed The Daily Sun, now sub-Saharan Africa's largest newspaper, with 5 million daily readers. Born and raised in South Africa, Andy is a serial social entrepreneur and author of books including Democracy Beyond Borders (Oxford) and Global Responsibilities (Routledge). He holds a PhD from Cambridge, where he was supervised by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who first stimulated Andy’s interest in market-based solutions to poverty.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is the future of social entrepreneurship?

Andrew Kuper: Social entrepreneurship is an incredibly exciting movement. It was spawned by Bill Drayton about 30 years ago who is an incredibly visionary entrepreneur who had the idea that you could really do venture capital for the social sector. So you could pick visionary entrepreneurs committed to systematic social change who had ethical fiber, who were committed to social impact, who were innovative and you could back them, give them some resources and a global support system that allowed them to achieve their goals whether it was in environment, education, healthcare, immigration, multiple different kinds of social impact and then this movement really rocketed and what allowed it to do was both the vision and the power of Ashoka and it offshoots like Endeavor and Acumen and other wonderful organizations that supports social entrepreneurs but it was also the massive growth of the social sector.

So the nonprofits; if you look at the numbers, they’re dramatic. Between 1980 and 2005, you basically have the number of nonprofits in Brazil, go from, I believe it was something like 5,000 to nearly a million, you had in the US, the number of nonprofits go from around 400,000 to 1.2 million so you have this massive burgeoning of the social sector. It suddenly become a much bigger space with much more impact and if you think about it historically, this is interesting because in the 19th Century, we had the Industrial Revolution, in the 18th and 19th Century. At the beginning of the 20th Century and with the world wars, we had the massive growth of the state so you had the burgeoning of the state but the social sector was left behind and we’ve had in the past decades is a massive growth of that sector, almost an Industrial Revolution of that sector.

Now that creates large opportunities because you not only have large numbers of organizations but organizations that can work together and have a division of labor where you achieve much more. Now, what’s the next way for social entrepreneurship, well, I’m particularly excited by things that go up the next level so it helps organizations to work together very effectively whether it’s collaborative technology architectures, whether it’s organizations like Ashoka, Endeavor, and Acumen that helped entrepreneurs to find commonalities, Ashoka of course is a group collaboration, whether it’s financing vehicles that goes to the next level, that back a whole lot of different companies and try to see or organizations and see the synergies between those.

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