Social Businesses: Solving Social Problems Sustainably

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INTRODUCTION
Social businesses are companies created to serve the main purpose of solving the social problems which is however financially self-sustainable. In many countries, social businesses have become an integral tool for both economic and social development. A myriad of instigating cases of social business that have a positive impact on addressing the societal ills have been documented in many literatures (Jiao, 2011). Entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged for generating and increasing the growth and economic wealth to societies. Social entrepreneurship can be said to play identical roles in the creation of social wealth in times and situations where there are great needs for both the social and ecological solutions (Light, 2010). …show more content…

For example a variety of conceptual perspectives that apply to different domains such as public management non-profits, philanthropy and social issue management has also been applied to social entrepreneurship. According to Boschee and McClurg (2003), social entrepreneurship shares some similarities with non-profit organizations that are pointed towards providing a more efficient means to deliver their social …show more content…

Like many business missions, as social mission states the aim and objectives of the organizations. However the difference between a social mission and a business mission is the fact that the social mission is embedded for social purposes.
Social entrepreneurs tend to have a clear picture of their social mission, usually through the discernment of the social needs and how to improve the depressing status of the social needs (Dees and Muller, 2008). Social entrepreneurs transcends charitable giving’s and philanthropy to achieve their social mission and usually they focus on the challenges causing the social problems rather than just identifying and alleviating the symptoms (Nga and Shamuganathan, 2010).
The growing global awareness of the concept of social entrepreneurship can be attributed to the four factors that were highlighted by Zahra et al (2008). These factors include; corporate social responsibility movement, technological advances and shared responsibility, market, institutional and state failure and global wealth

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