As strengthening the financial base has become a shared issue for the Asian civil society sector, attention has been focused on "social entrepreneurs," organizations that seek to resolve social problems by securing funds through their own profit-making activities, not relying on overseas aid and government subsidies. In its first year, this project collected information on the activities of the private nonprofit sector in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand that have been successful in social entrepreneurship.
This year, the results of case studies were compiled, and the Asian Social Entrepreneurship Forum was held to share those NPO/NGOs' expriences with the Asian region as a whole. Approximately 40 representatives of grantmaking foundations and project-implementing organizations in nine Asian countries and territories explored the factors behind success in each case and discussed one another's experiences about the difficulties facing them.
Social entrepreneurship can be undertaken by either commercial companies or nonprofit organizations, but in seeking to fulfill a social mission through profit-making activities both are required to satisfy two bottom lines: profitability and social contribution, which cannot be gauged in terms of profits alone. Pursuit of profit is new to the NPO/NGO culture, and sometimes fails to gain acceptance. Meanwhile, although Asian communities do not have the English term "social entrepreneurship" itself, similar indigenous concepts exist in their tradition of self-help efforts and mutual-support activities. This project offered an opportunity for Asian NPO/NGOs to reexamine their own activities and societies by extrapolating from social entrepreneurship.
All the successful cases aim to contribute to benefiting or resolving problems in sectors that are not reached by public services or that tend to be marginalized in the system of market economics. In India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand the main areas of activity include poverty reduction in the context of community development and the alleviation of economic disparities in rural communities and urban slums. In Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan they include problems of the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed. In addition, regardless of country or territory there are many enterprises in the fields of environmental conservation and restoration of minority cultures.
This project enabled young professionals in the private nonprofit sector to share experiences regarding the factors behind success and the challenges encountered in the practice of social entrepreneurship in Asia. In addition, academics like researchers at the Asia Institute of Management, in the Philippines, and the National Institute of Development Administration, in Thailand, cooperated well with practitioners in collecting and analyzing the case studies. A collection of those case studies, Creating Space in the Market: Social Enterprise Stories in Asia, is being used as a teaching aid at those institutes.