Upcoming forum seeks to help social enterprises thrive

Lightup Impact team visiting member organization Grown to Help in Kigali, Rwanda.

"We aim to educate, inform, and celebrate the transformative power in responding to social and environmental challenges within society."

His sentiments echo those of Kaligirwa Bridget Kigambo, the co-founder of the Girl Potential Care Centre, a social enterprise seeking to empower girls in Western Uganda to identify and exploit their abilities to their full potential.

"The concept must be community owned. Capacity building and skills development towards sustainability are key as social enterprises can identify opportunities within the sectors they create solutions, and eventually turn to income-earning ventures," says Kigambo.

Girl Potential Care Centre nurtures, mentors, and empowers girls to maximise their full potential in the fields of social work and charity, arts and crafts, entrepreneurship, and urban farming. In this way, they can, directly and indirectly, impact families and communities to contribute to the eradication of poverty, and the spread of HIV/Aids, and advocate for human rights for the youth and the country at large.

Molho and Kigambo note that, given that most of the social entrepreneurs are individual entities, it is difficult to accumulate enough funds at the beginning stages of development.

As a result, over time, only some ventures flourish whilst a vast majority of the ventures struggle to maintain their existence and sustainability due to a lack of capital or stable sources of income.

Shifting the power

Despite developments in financial systems, the traditional support mechanisms, such as banks or financial institutions, that foster the development of social enterprises, are quite scarce compared to those for commercial enterprises.

Moreover, social enterprises generally only spring up from social inequity or market failure when the traditional systems are not enough to meet the needs. The primary problem involving a majority of social enterprises is that they cannot scale up the enterprise to the next level.

While some social entrepreneurs earn money through their ventures, considering this as a more ethical way to do business, some do this with the mission to create a social impact, and some try to create social value and develop a sustainable business model.

In efforts towards a world where development is not imposed but emerges from the ground up, and where communities thrive because they have the power to shape their futures, Lightup Impact will host its second annual conference that sets the stage to amplify grassroots leaders and their narratives within the social enterprise realm.

The Lightup Impact Days 2023 conference will be held on the 11 and 12 of September in Boma Hotel, Nairobi.