The Social Enterprise Sector in Egypt: Current Status and Way Forward

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.