Social entrepreneurship has always offered solutions to problems in society (as Cynthia describes here); Mohamed Ali argues how entrepreneurship itself Is the solution.

Ali’s  Iftiin Foundation supports small startups in Africa through mentorship and funding. He argues that by providing work for the unemployed, entrepreneurship allows these youth to “be creators of the economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking”. Just by offering value proposition that had never been before, being resourceful, and strategically enhancing the lives of the customers, the work of these youth is serving a larger societal purpose.

Even without identifying itself as having a vision of social entrepreneurship (or even knowledge of the term), these Somalian youth have effectively created a social enterprise. Their presence in the society pushes economic growth; their products (flowers at a wedding) brings hope to the land suffering from no greenery after decades of war.

Alanna presents another model of a social enterprise that began with the goal of employing youth and began to serve a grander purpose. The key to creating shared value is to ensure that each step of the business model integrates and generates social value, rather than “plugging in” environmental causes into a T-shirt business through a marketing ploy of planting ten trees for each sales as TenTree does.