The main brain behind the setting up of Sri Lanka's stock exchange Dr. Darin Gunasekera , a member of the Global South Council of social entrepreneurs an Ashoka fellow is now planning to introduce social entrepreneurship concept in the island nation. Social entrepreneurship is helping change the landscape of business and economics around the world.
Thousands of creative people are bringing in their expertise in business and entrepreneurship to address the problems of the world. If you are but starting out in this field, you will need to understand the problems of the world that you want to address, Dr. Gunasekera said .In an interview with the Free hold Section of Sunday Times, he noted that in a country Like Sri Lanka, social enterprises will help in the uplifting of the living standard of the marginalized sector and lower economic classes with little or no access to the resources needed to build their future. Medical services to the marginalize sectors is one of the areas which he is considering for Sri Lanka under his social entrepreneurship initiative .By providing health and medical services to poor and marginalized peoples, they can enjoy a better quality of life, he said.
Ashoka foundation has recognized the efforts of Dr. Darin Gunasekera in solving the housing problem for the urban poor in Colombo, Sri Lanka's commercial capital. Given the exorbitant prices of land in the Colombo, the urban poor had to live as squatters and thus were deprived of obtaining basic amenities such as water, sewerage and electricity.
Dr. Gunasekera's innovative scheme enabled the urban poor to obtain entitlement certificates for apartments in exchange for vacating areas that they had squatted on giving them legal tenure to their new dwellings. His innovative idea also created new products for banks and opened up areas in the city centre for productive usage. The government was also coached into a new role of regulator for transparent transactions rather than the role of provider of housing for urban poor. 670 families have found houses through his innovative programme and he has been approached by parties from United Kingdom and India. Dr. Gunasekera also proposes to make use of this concept in Eastern Europe too.
Most entrepreneurs consider it a luxury to focus on social or environmental issues. They want to find financial security first, to get on their feet and move beyond the daily survival worries. Dedicating oneself to another, bigger cause is a daunting responsibility, and most businesses focus on much more immediate goals of simply making a profit.
But social entrepreneurship doesn't have to mean running such enterprises.. There's another way to look at it: Social entrepreneurship is nothing more than offering innovative solutions to significant problems within a society. When you look at it that way, social entrepreneurship really isn't all that different from the kind of entrepreneurship that is driven solely by the desire over financial profit. It's just a different way of channeling the psychological energy you put into your business. Instead of focusing on making money, you focus on serving the needs of your customers. Seen from that perspective, social entrepreneurship isn't dreamy and utopian, it's just good business he said. |
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