Skoll World Forum 2009

This year’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship was nothing if not inspiring. The record attendance – 785 delegates from 65 countries and six continents despite the downturn – was surely evidence of the level of interest in social entrepreneurship.

Unusually, investors were notable by their presence: in a session on ‘expansion capital’, a show of hands suggested that half of those in the room were investors. But the question remains: can we go beyond inspiration?

The potential of social entrepreneurship tends to be much hyped, and nowhere more than at the Forum, which does a fine job of highlighting the achievements of some outstanding individuals. But can social entrepreneurs deliver what is expected of them?

The short film with which the Forum closed encapsulates my doubt. Beginning with a sequence of disasters that occurred in 2008 – collapsing ice sheets, the earthquake in China, poor Americans losing their homes, plummeting stock markets – accompanied by some rather pensive music, the film ends with the achievements of prominent social entrepreneurs like Partners in Health, YouthBuild and Riders for Health, the music this time being almost triumphal. The message: all around the world social entrepreneurs are making a difference.

But can they make enough difference? Unless their efforts can be scaled up and connected, they will surely not be up to dealing with the world of disaster shown in the first half of the film.

One outstanding session at the Forum focused on ‘early detection and prevention’ in healthcare. The stories were deeply moving, both the scale of the problems and what had been achieved. Bart Weetjens of APOPO described how rats have been trained to detect both landmines and tuberculosis. He has already received a formal request from the Colombian government to help with training rats to sniff out landmines, but first the organization needs to scale up beyond what Weetjens called the ‘arts and crafts’ stage. Gene Falk of mothers2mothers explained how mothers are being trained to mentor other mothers to prevent mother- child HIV transmission.

Another excellent session on scaling up presented, among others, an impressive organization called Embarq that works to develop sustainable transport systems in some of the world’s biggest cities. In Istanbul, for example, where poor women were taking up to six hours getting home from work because of traffic congestion on a key bridge, introduction of a bus-only lane has transformed the situation. Sustainable transport systems are now planned in most cities in Mexico following the introduction of new, non-polluting buses and a bus-only corridor In Mexico City.

But these sessions tend to be stronger on description and inspiration than analysis. They make too little attempt to understand why some organizations are able to scale up and what it is about them that makes them successful. The questions that immediately arise – can these initiatives be scaled up? Or linked up? – are left frustratingly unanswered.

We get glimpses of what wider solutions in terms of collaboration might look like. In his closing remarks Jeff Skoll talked of how Paul Farmer of Partners in Health is working with Kiva to raise money for community health workers. One can imagine how the administration of the oral vaccines being developed by Ken Kelley’s PaxVax might be monitored by mother2mother’s lay health workers and Partners in Health’s community health workers.

But only glimpses – and huge questions remain. Can social entrepreneurs collaborate without becoming like the unwieldy bureaucracies they are trying to escape from? To echo a question posed by Paul Farmer, can collaboration around ‘vertical health interventions’ (public health jargon for interventions to counter specific diseases and health problems) be used to strengthen public health systems?  Can projects that are ‘vertical’ and sexy do more work for everyone by adopting set of metrics that demand more from grantees, perhaps along the very rigorous lines sketched out by Jamie Cooper-Hohn of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in a session on measuring impact?

But we need more of this. Where a conference brings together a group of people around a particular issue, say climate change or social entrepreneurship, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could offer more than inspiration and good networking opportunities, and really advance thinking in the field?

Event  Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
Date   25-27 March
Venue  Oxford, UK
Organizer  Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

For more information
www.skollworldforum.com/forum-2009