Women in Africa sewing clothing. People like Maryanne Mathias are responsible for giving these women opportunities like this to make money and improve their own living standards.
A social enterprise is any organization that places maximizing improvements in human and environmental well being ahead of maximizing profits. Even if the United Nations were to be fully funded, it does not necessarily mean that having Arc or social enterprise is useless. As a matter of fact, even if the UN were to have full funding, they would still not be able to improve the well being of humans and the environment like social entrepreneurs are able to. The problems that things such as the Sauder School of Business’s Arc Initiative solve go well beyond just financing and money. These are more so ethical issues that require the individual who is funding the project to have a passion in making it succeed.
Take Osei-Duro clothing’s co-founder Maryanne Mathias for example. When her company was struggling with production issues, rather than pour more money into higher skilled workers, she made the decision of personally fixing their production issues and provided better training to her current workforce, a workforce of women who really needed the money in order to live a better lifestyle. Hypothetically speaking, if a fully funded UN were in charge of this decision, they would most likely decide to use their large sum of funds to bring in more skilled workers to deal with the poor production quality that Osei-Duro was experiencing. As you can see there is quite the difference between the two scenarios, as one is strictly money based and the other goes beyond the financing and improves the lives of the struggling workers. This shows how the social entrepreneur made a much larger difference than a fully funded UN. Thus, proving why we would still indeed need the Arc/social enterprise even when there is a fully funded United Nations.
Links
http://skollworldforum.org/about/what-is-social-entrepreneurship/