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Executive Summary

Social entrepreneurship has led to new models and collaborations that not only provide authentic learning opportunities but, in doing so, address some of our current challenges and improve the world around us. Experience of these new models can lead to higher levels of learner motivation and engagement as well as the development of social conscience and a new sense of purpose. There are many examples of innovative learning practices and models emerging from the most challenged communities. This session will address examples of social enterprise and explore how these can best be developed to support learning and society.

 

 

Executive Summary

 

I. Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI)
Rodrigo Baggio

The CDI is a community-based organisation and its community centres are self-managed. The community centre approach is based on three key pillars: education, services and micro-enterprise, and the principle of using technology to transform the lives of young people. CDI started 15 years ago and now has 820 community centres in 20 Brazilian states and 13 countries, most of them in Latin America but also including the UK and Jordan. We also work with juvenile prisons and it is amazing to see how technology can be used to change people’s lives. One example was a prisoner who became one of our coordinators and started a CDI centre in his own community when he was released. This ex-prisoner has created 197 micro-enterprises with other former prisoners.

The Asháninka have been using the Internet as one of their weapons in the war against Peruvian drug dealers, emailing the president and the military to request help, and they were able to drive them out in this way. The most important aspect of the CDI’s work is the way in which technology has been able to change people’s lives. The assertion of the right to use technology, however, can also change society by creating freedom and solidarity.

II. Learning from the Extremes
Charles Leadbeater

The vantage point from which you choose to address a problem will determine much of the solution, and if you seek a model of what education might become, you look at Finland. The problem is that Finland is homogenous, cohesive and highly developed, so the answers you get might not be relevant to the needs you face. Therefore, you should start from need, not from the best possible model. Social entrepreneurs are very good at recognising and articulating need, campaigning about it, and mobilising and using resources. The biggest need is created by the fact that we are creating six mega-cities of 12 million people a year over the next 30 years, almost all in the developing world.

There are two kinds of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. There are two ways in which people innovate: formally and informally. The best way of sustaining formal innovation is by improving existing school systems, but since this is not enough, social entrepreneurs also reinvent schools. They create ways for people to learn with and by one another. One of the main weaknesses of education is that school is only one influence on how children learn, and social entrepreneurs create new ways to link schools to communities. They create new ways to learn new things, and motivate people to learn rather than forcing them.

Education gives people hope, but it needs reformation. The danger is that it becomes self-referential, bearing little relation to the outside world. One of the biggest challenges for policy makers is to create new ways for people to learn.

III. The Barefoot College
Bunker Roy

This example of a Barefoot College was built in 1986, and believes only in traditional knowledge and skills. It cost $1.5 (US) per square foot and 150 people stay there. It is the only college that is run entirely on solar energy. We set out to demystify technology and bring it to those who matter the most, and we came up with the idea that we should train women. We have trained women all over India, and have electrified 600 villages with solar energy. Extending this scheme to Mauritania in West Africa, we decided not only to train women, but to train grandmothers to be solar engineers, electrifying over 600 houses so far.

Four communities, over 50 km from the nearest electric grid, agreed to take full responsibility for electrification in 2008, and agreed to send four women, mothers and grandmothers, to India for training for six months. The four women established workshops and started the electrification programme, transforming the four villages. The decentralised Barefoot approach has reached 27 countries in Africa and has trained 140 grandmothers. Through a unique collaboration with the Indian government, the travel and training costs for grandmothers from any part of the world will be paid for. We are now in 30 countries worldwide.

There are indigenous solutions available everywhere, and we just need the capacity and competence to demonstrate this. The amount spent on the entire programme was $3 million (US).