social enterprise

The evening the transformer in the estate finally blew for good, a young woman two streets away had already started selling small solar lamps from a wheelbarrow, charging them off a panel on her roof. She was not a charity. She sold each lamp for a price that covered her cost and left her a small profit, but her real goal was to keep children reading after dark without their parents choking on kerosene fumes. That wheelbarrow business is the clearest consider of what a social enterprise is.

A social enterprise is a company that puts a social or environmental mission at the centre of what it does, and then builds a normal, sensible business around that mission so it can survive without waiting on donations forever. It sells something, a product or a service, and the money from those sales is what keeps the lights on and the mission alive.

This is different from a regular charity that depends mostly on grants and goodwill, and different from a regular company whose main job is to grow profit for shareholders. A social enterprise sits in between. In Lagos, a company that trains young women as electricians and then sells their labour to construction sites is a social enterprise. In the United Kingdom, a coffee shop that only hires people who have struggled with homelessness, and pays them a proper wage from coffee sales, is the same idea wearing a different accent.

Diaspora Nigerians often meet this model when they want to send money home in a way that does more than one job. Instead of just paying school fees for a niece, some fund a small social enterprise in their hometown, a bakery that trains widows, a recycling business that pays market women for plastic waste. The money moves like an investment, not a handout, and that changes how everyone involved treats it.

The honest truth is that running one is harder than running either a pure charity or a pure profit machine, because you are answering to two masters at once, the mission and the balance sheet.