Entrepreneurship
a strategy for self-sustainability
More self-sustainability means having more autonomy and less reliance on external funding, expertise or decisions. It means having a larger capacity to choose and negotiate with other initiatives what’s best for your project and what’s not. It means an increasingly equitable participation, which will lead to development models that are more comprehensive and relevant for all, that is, more sustainable. Know more
Several development projects become more self-sustainable by deploying entrepreneurship strategies themselves, or by encouraging entrepreneurship in the communities they work with.
Entrepreneurship means using business strategies to develop and finance solutions to a problem or answers to a need. And in the social arena specifically, entrepreneurship means taking on the task of solving a development problem while considering self-financing strategies that prioritize the social goal in question.
Some initiatives are themselves entrepreneurship projects: a group of people identify a problem and come up with a scheme to create financial resources to solve it. In many cases, they decide to sell services or knowledge related to the problem they are targeting, which they can do through trainings, face-to-face or online workshops, consultancies, etc. These projects sometimes decide to legally register as social enterprises or hybrid organizations to be able to make gains. Having their own profits allows these initiatives to make decisions with less pressure from donors or actors with interests, priorities or ways of working that do not necessarily match their own or the local community’s; in other words, they become more self-sustainable.
Some initiatives that are not entrepreneurship projects in themselves do promote entrepreneurship in the communities they work with. In doing so they are trying to build capacity, at the local level, to identify and leverage resources to solve problems with more autonomy by yielding a profit, which can be reinvested in solutions that are relevant to their context. To achieve local entrepreneurship, initiatives sometimes offer training and capacity building courses, create exchange systems with alternative currencies, design business models together with the communities (such as ecotourism or the production of goods), and so on.
There are many different ways to use entrepreneurship to make development projects more self-sustainable. Take a look at how these initiatives have done it!
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