Social change: A selfless step for humankind

Marco Kusumawijaya, Contributor, Jakarta

Zamrisyaf, a 46-year-old worker at the State Electricity Company (PLN) in West Sumatra, invented a machine that generates electricity from ocean waves, Kompas daily reported earlier this month.

Using a pendulum to capture and transform energy, the machine, costing Rp 3 million each, can be installed on any beach with steady wave movements to produce three kilowatts, enough energy to give light to 20 fishermen's houses. It can also be used to freeze the fishermen's catch and start a processing home industry to increase income and relieve them of the risk of going out to sea during bad weather.

He has been asked to present his invention before top officials, but he is far from satisfied, as the machine has yet to become a standard device in coastal settlements across this vast archipelago. If he achieves that, he will indeed create a revolutionary step in improving the life of many, while producing alternative "clean energy" in mass, which is a goal in itself.

How to do that? He is already an inventor, but now he needs to become a social entrepreneur.

He might want to learn from Fabio Rosa, a Brazilian agronomic engineer, who in the 1980s practically changed national norms to make rural electrification affordable. He lowered the cost per household connection from US$7,000 (equivalent to five to 10 years income for a poor farmer) to $400.

Electricity means it is possible for the farmers to pump water -- another rare resource -- from artesian wells to irrigate rice plantations, hence increasing crop yields and, consequently, income. Another plus it that it creates better conditions for children to study at night.

Rosa, unlike Zamrisyaf, used inventions of others, bringing different components together and adapting them to national norms. He is an entrepreneur because he is, in the words of Joseph A. Schumpeter, the source of "creative destruction" and, in the words of Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist writing two centuries ago, he is "shifting economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield".

The social entrepreneur is a concept, now offered for study at some leading universities, referring to those exceptional people like Rosa who make systemic change to solve society's fundamental problems on a large scale, but not for personal profit. Their core inventiveness is in the "how-to", not in the invention of technology or hardware, although they sometimes do that as well.

Bornstein links the rise with the emergence of a global "citizen sector" in the last three decades. Twenty years ago, Indonesia had only one independent environmental organization, today it has more than 2,000. In the United States, 70 percent of registered citizen groups are less than 30 years old. John Hopkins University's study of eight developed countries found that between 1990 and 1995, employment in this sector grew two and a half times faster than for the overall economy.

Since the last decade, growth of the sector is occurring on a scale never seen before. Its organizations are more globally dispersed and diverse, and moving toward more systemic approach to problems, forging more partnerships with businesses, academic institutions and governments, and, driven by increased competition and heightened attention to performance, is experiencing the benefits of entrepreneurship.

A driving force behind this emergence is the rise in demand for the sector's service, because people recognize that change is urgently needed as they become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, frustrated by failing government policies and the widening gap between the short-term interests of the decision- making elite and the long-term interests of society.

To trace the emergence of social entrepreneurship within the above context, the author has chosen Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, an organization that supported social entrepreneurs with grants, because it is the only such institution that has been monitoring this phenomenon at the global level for more than 20 years.

Ashoka does not claim that it creates social entrepreneurs, but simply identifies them at certain points where they need support to carry on with their important work. In Indonesia, the first fellows were selected in 1984, and it has supported a total of 104. It is currently forging a partnership with a management school in Jakarta to set up the Center for Social Entrepreneurship Development.

How to Change the World could be too grand a title for a book about those individuals who are modest, although they did change the world, at least their respective ones. Its publication coincided nicely with the World Social Forum in Mumbai last month. The individuals described in it do not just believe that "another world is possible", but actually proved it.

There is a tone of overwhelming empathy for Ashoka, its works, founders and fellows in the book. It reads largely like an extended company profile of Ashoka, but the Ashoka Indonesia office in Bandung (ashokaindonesia@bdg.centrin.net.id) assured me that it is not a sponsored book. They also told me that an Indonesian version is being considered.

How to Change the World is an easy-to-read work written in a fascinating style that combines analysis with vivid first-person stories in concise sentences, paragraphs and chapters. It is the result of five years' research, including interviews with more than 100 social entrepreneurs all over the world.

Seven longer chapters, each about 20 pages long, tell individual case studies of seven living social entrepreneurs, from an Indian who opened a hot line for child protection, an American who helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college and a South African who developed a home-based care model for AIDS patients.

Two shorter chapters tell of historical figures, the 19th century English nurse Florence Nightingale and James Grant, head of UNICEF in 1980-19995, who is credited with saving 25 million lives by leading a global campaign for immunization.

Other shorter chapters, each nine to 14 pages, are inserted between the above chapters. They tell the history of Ashoka, the biography of its founder, Bill Drayton, and some of the writer's synthesizing ideas.

In all chapters, there are brief references to other social entrepreneurs, including Muhammad Yunus, who in the 1980s and 1990s introduced large scale micro-credit and founded the famous Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which was the subject of Bornstein's previous book The Price of a Dream: The story of the Grameen Bank (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1997)

The way the two types of chapters are organized is interesting and prevents the book from being a boring documentation of facts. This may inspire many development agencies in writing up their lessons-learned documentation into books. As Borstein suggests, the works of social entrepreneurs need be systematically studied, documented and made replicable to respond to the expanding citizen sector and to speed up changing of the world with higher efficiency. And mass-media may help in discovering and exposing more social entrepreneurs to that goal, to create a critical mass.

They are newsworthy, because they are "destabilizing forces" (one definition of newsworthiness), even when many of them are not as "sexy" news items as others. Most important of all, there is the demand for their stories, as people increasingly recognize that change is urgently needed.

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas David Bornstein, 2004, Oxford Univesity Press 336 pp US$28