What role would social enterprise play if the United Nations itself could provide as much financial support needed by developing countries ? This is the question I hope to answer through this blog entry.
The United Nations works towards fostering international development through its numerous member agencies. It works towards uplifting poor or backward nations socially, economically and politically. Now if the United Nations were fully funded you would think that development for these poor countries would be so much easier because they would now have the financial backing to move out of poverty. The situation however is a bit more complicated. Take Africa for example, more than 500 billion dollars of foreign aid was provided to the region between 1967 and 1990 [1]. That is an enormous amount of money and still the continent remains among the poorest of areas in the world. Why? the answer to that question is, aid is helpful only if its process of distribution is streamlined and controlled. The number one problem in all developing countries is corruption, when money pours into the country it first reaches the pockets of the powerful, and finally the small remainder trickles down to the people who actually need it. Another problem is citizens of poor countries do not know how to make use of the money they have received simply because they are uneducated. We need arc initiatives and social enterprise to not only control this process of money distribution but to also educate people about their financial prospects. When Fitih Tesfaye visited the Sauder School of Business Arc Initiative she discovered a market within the food industry she could enter, to expand her small food business. This is why we need such programs, the United Nations is a very large body it can provide the groundwork for improvement but the job of actually setting the processes into motion lies with the hands of these programs.
To conclude, even if the United Nations were fully funded we would still require Social Enterprise to provide the platform for the poor to harness their talents and financial prospects.
Works Cited:
[1] http://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulletin/african-perspectives-aid-foreign-assistance-will-not-pull-africa-out-poverty
IMAGE URL : http://davefoster.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/SocialEnterprise_graphic2.png