Environmental Factors for Social Entrepreneurship Success: Comparing Four Regions

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship attempts to address social problems traditional entrepreneurs and governments fail to address. A growing amount of literature now exists that attempts to explain patterns that characterize successful social enterprises. But these patterns play out differently in different regions and countries. In this study we compare successful social entrepreneurs from North America, Latin America, India, and Sub-Sahara Africa to find out how they exploited or worked around locally- constraining or institutional conditions in order to reduce humanitarian problems. We used information from the Ashoka Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Our main finding is that institutional differences result in different approaches to social entrepreneurship, including the choice of social problems to tackle and population segments to focus on. In North America social entrepreneurs focus a little more on social injustice problems than on rural poverty. It is the opposite in Africa.