Last week in Berlin at a Forum on Social Entrepreneurship hosted by German venture capital company Hasso Plattner Ventures, Rael Lissoos and Dabba won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 award. The event, sponsored by Deutsches Bank and MAN brought together 250 social entrepreneurs together with investors.
This is great news for Dabba and by extension for the Village Telco. The concept of Social Entrepreneurship has recently had some push-back in the form of a critique of philanthrocapitalism called Just Another Emperor. While the publication justly criticises the broad generalisation that non-profits should operate more like businesses, it seems clear to me that there is a lot of development mileage to be had from enterprises that operate on the principles of enlightened self-interest.
Equally, it seems clear to me that Open Source and Open Hardware offer a great intersection point between philanthropy and entrepreneurship. By supporting the development of software and hardware that help Dabba operate their social enterprise but doing it via open licenses, we can lower the barrier to entry in a market which is dying for more competition. Too often, donors make the mistake of funding an interesting pilot thinking that it would find sustainability once it got on its feet. I certainly have been guilty of this often enough myself. Sadly, more often than not, that initial funding, against all intention, creates a culture of dependence.
Philanthropists need to make it easy to do the right thing without doing the right thing. We need to do more leading of horses to water and less making them drink 🙂
Good work and congratulations Rael.
I have found open hardware and software to be a good outlet for my philanthropic desires. I don’t have millions to contribute but I do have a skill set that can generate useful Intellectual Property (IP). After thinking long and hard on what I could do to improve the world I decided to “inject some IP into the planet” rather than say working directly in the developing world. The specific area I contribute to is low cost VOIP phone systems.
To maximise the amount and quality of IP generated I have used the open source model applied to hardware, and using a community based approach we have built several products that have strong commercial appeal. The commercial appeal guarantees that the open hardware IP will be picked up and used through normal commercial processes, much like Linux is used to power $49 routers. Normal commercial forces then encourage competition, mass production, and new features. The end result (hopefully) is lower cost telephony for the world.
This approach has very high efficiency. Modest inputs (in my case roughly a single man-year of effort) can produce a lot of benefit (a product design that can potentially help millions). Combined with appropriate business models, we have a very competitive model for development compared to current donor-funded-forever approaches.