The making of a social entrepreneur: When impact supersedes profit

Megan Mukuria, Founder Zana Africa speaking during the induction ceremony of new Ashoka Fellows. [Courtesy]

Megan Mukuria is a rebel. But a rebel with a cause. And her cause, to provide opportunities to girls and women, has seen her build a budding business - Zana Africa.

Zana Africa manufactures sanitary pads, which Ms Mukuria refers to as a fast-moving education good. It has two arms - for-profit and not-for-profit. It is the firm behind the Nia Pads brand in the market.

Her journey, she says, has taken her 25 years. "Looking back it does not look like a 25-year-old journey," she jokes.

It is her rebellion that led her to this path of social entrepreneurship, away from her home in the United States (US). A Harvard University graduate, having studied cognitive neuroscience and later specialised in psychology, running a business in Kenya looks far away from what her life should have turned out to be.

She admits she has broken some norms that would have dictated her life. For example, she took Swahili classes after her first visit to Kenya in 1998 which angered her father.

"I took Swahili and not accounting!" she says, trying to re-enact the exchange with her father. Also, she married a Kenyan, away from what was expected of her having grown up in a neighbourhood that was traditional.

"When I was 16, I was told I was not allowed to date anyone of colour," she recalls.

Ms Mukuria was a speaker during the induction of eight fellows into Ashoka, a global network of social entrepreneurs.

Social entrepreneurship slightly defers from mainstream (entrepreneurship) as the start-up and business owners pursue to create an impact in their societies or communities through their businesses. They are branded 'change makers'.

Ashoka boasts 489 fellows across 28 countries in Africa. Globally this number stands at about 4,000 across 96 countries.

Ms Mukuria is an Ashoka Fellow having been inducted in 2014 because of her work with girls and women.

Peris Wakesho, Africa fellowship Director at Ashoka Africa explains that Ashoka is a network of leading social entrepreneurs who run a change-making business started in 1980 by Bill Drayton - a renowned American-based social entrepreneur. The network exists by finding social entrepreneurs and connecting them to each other through cohort fellowships.

They then share ideas which Ashoka can also use to create models that can be adopted by the change markers.

"People say it's lonely at the top but it gets lonelier when you try to shift industrial norms. It is lonely at the top, and even lonelier. You need a team that is as crazy as you. That is why we build the network so that they can support themselves and learn from each other," she said.

Social justice

It is during this induction she shared her 25-year-old journey detailing the unique struggles social entrepreneurs go through to build businesses that impact society.

Her journey to Kenya in 1998 is what sparked an interest in her.

She had been invited then by Nairobi Chapel due to her work around social justice while at Harvard University. When she came, she worked with an organisation that rehabilitated girls from the street.

"That kind of work reminded me in a very experiential way how talents and intellects are spread equally across humanity but opportunities are not," she notes.

This was her light bulb moment. When she returned to the US, she says, she felt a strong tie to Kenya but she left for fate to decide.

She was later recalled by the same organisation which invited her to be a mentor with a two-year contract.

Her work went beyond mentorship as she was tasked to look into ways the organisation could operate sustainably by raising funds.

While tabulating running costs, she noticed that bread and sanitary pads were the two leading expenses per child. A bakery became the solution for bread as she sought out a long-lasting answer for sanitary pads.

She thought maybe manufacturing sanitary pads sustainably from local materials would work. However, the organisation did not share her big vision. "I was forced out of the organisation. They wanted smaller solutions but not systemic change," she says.

She called her parents and told them she is jobless but she is not coming back home. Instead, she wants to figure out how to make sanitary pads. "You can imagine the silence from my parents," she says.

She was faced with numerous questions which she says made her realise people around the world want solutions but do not want to understand the process.

"How are you making pads? I don't know, I am figuring it out. Nobody in the world is actually making affordable high-quality pads from local materials to reduce cost at scale," she says.

"It was a very lonely journey for a very long time. You are going against the grain. You are doing something that is solving such a deep problem that a lot of time people cannot understand it and it is hard for them to join because it threatens status quo," she adds.

Between 2006 and 2011, she says, they did not get any money. She later got a co-founder whom she worked with in her kitchen back in Massachusetts, US, to create the pads.

When the Gates Foundation invited applications for grants, they looked for another grant to develop a business plan which they applied for. "Then they said no. I was like...that can't be it," she says expressing her shock then. "This innovation can't stop now."

But a one-liner in the rejection email said: "If you would like to chat, however, we would be happy to talk, made them reach out."

"It took about nine months but they ended up saying yes," she says. A grant of Sh132 million ($1 million) was given for development and research which led to the pads which are now sold across 40 counties.

Even with the success so far, Ms Mukuria admits that getting investors is still not easy even as they are scaling up on the non-profit side of the business with a government partnership. "Still nobody wants to fund us," she says adding that the funding system is not in favour of social entrepreneurship.