Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East

Social entrepreneurship is a new trend that has taken the world of business by storm. Across the globe, social entrepreneurship continues to advance and seems to be increasingly recognized as a welcome addition to the traditional business lexicon, given its immense potential for shared value creation. According to Gregory Dees, who is credited as the father of social entrepreneurship and to whom we dedicate this book, given his untimely passing earlier this year, a social entrepreneurial organization places a social mission as the priority over creating profit or wealth, tackling social issues with a business-like approach (Dees, 2001). Social entrepreneurship thus brings much needed entrepreneurial energy into the social space, harnessing the power and ingenuity of business to generate positive social innovations and social change across the world.

The years 2011–2013 have seen Arab citizens take matters into their own hands by demanding change and mobilizing the human resources, human energy, and social networks required to make change happen. These developments have brought a new set of questions about how citizens will implement social change in a sustainable, scalable manner to address the social, economic, and political problems they brought to light, namely the lack of freedom imposed by poverty, poor health, limited education, and undemocratic governance.

Social entrepreneurship is making a strong contribution and positive impact in the world. This conclusion is drawn from the analysis of the numerous successful models across sectors in different regions of the world (Bornstein, 1998; Light, 2008; Bornstein and Davis, 2010). In some contexts, social entrepreneurship is also known as “social enterprise” (Robinson, 2006). Social enterprise (SE) activities have social entrepreneurs undertaking strategic endeavours to subsidize their services by seeking profitable opportunities in the core activities of their non-profit venture (Dees, 1998 a & b; Fowler, 2000; Alter 2006; Austin, 2006; Nicholls, 2006), or via for-profit ventures (Cleveland and Anderson, 2001; Yunus, 2006), or through cross partnerships with commercial companies (Hartigan, 2006; Nicholls, 2006). There are also social ventures that are highly entrepreneurial, meaning there is continuous innovation (Schumpeter, 2004) in providing public goods (Nicholls, 2006), without these enterprises necessarily generating independent profit streams.

When Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson began to build a human-powered helicopter in 2012, they were laughed at. It was considered impossible.

Social entrepreneurship is trending in MENA, drawing the attention of state actors, multinational corporations, and multilateral organizations. Seeking ways to catalyse economic development and address the pressures of the region’s “youth bulge”,¹ these actors tend to focus on the “business” end of the social enterprise spectrum (Abdou et al., 2010: 19). However, economic opportunity does not emerge in a vacuum. Instability and violence — due in part to sectarian tensions in the region — have significantly undermined economic growth (Buckner et al., 2012: 8–10; Mottaghi and Devarajan, 2014: 1).

During the last few years, social entrepreneurship has received greater recognition from the public sector as well as from scholars (Alvord et al., 2004; Dees and Anderson, 2006; Weerawardena and Mort, 2006; Volkmann et al., 2012) especially since Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, a renowned example of a social enterprise, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in order to give to the poor people living in Bangladesh access to microloans.

Social entrepreneurship is a broad term that does not entail a conventional definition. However, scholars have provided frameworks in defining it by taking into account the social and the entrepreneurial elements of the concept (Mair and Matri, 2005). There are three ways to define social entrepreneurship. The first way is introducing it as a concept that comprises the creation of innovative, sustainable solutions to instant social problems (James and Charles, Brett and Barr, 2007). The second definition is providing a double meaning to the individual social entrepreneurs: “latent social entrepreneurs” with implicit external corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Dees, 1998) and “manifest social entrepreneurs” leading explicit social businesses devoted to alleviating a social problem and introducing strategies for systemic change (Bloom and Chatterji, 2009). Third, providing an organizational meaning to it in three main displays:

Social entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon that impacts the lives of citizens through innovative approaches to solving social problems. It combines the passion of a social mission with businesslike discipline. Social entrepreneurship is being heralded as a novel strategy to solve social problems, create employment opportunities, ensure sustainable development, and alleviate poverty. It is a transformation in approaching challenges, which enables citizens to initiate and take responsibility rather than only demanding change. The social, economic, and governance challenges prevalent in a country become rich opportunities for a socially entrepreneurial mindset to initiate change and generate social impact.

Social entrepreneurship is defined as a productive enterprise, nonprofit or for-profit, with a core mission to provide social or environmental impact. This concept has become a global phenomenon in the public, private, and academic sectors. In the Middle East, this concept is growing exponentially due to the extensive social demands characterizing the region, in conjunction with the emerging potential of the entrepreneurship space and the ecosystem surrounding social enterprises overall.

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a new expression of an old concept (Dees, 1998) and has been able to capture the interest of many practitioners and researchers. This concept has emerged to solve social problems in an innovative and effective manner. The purpose of this chapter is to better understand the social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Tunisia, in the context of a democratic transition. We aim at identifying the main actors, their roles, and their interactions in this ecosystem besides highlighting some recommendations that are useful for nurturing entrepreneurship in Tunisia and that have wider applicability across the Arab region.