#SkollWF: My Offer to #Oxfam
It was July 2008. With our ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine published a year earlier in a prominent web journal, I wanted to share our strategy for tackling poverty through social investment:
28/07/2008
Thanks for taking time to examine my offers. If I make take a little more of your time, I’d like to explain our approach as a social purpose business which aims to stimulate local economies by creating trade. In plain terms, it’s a question of simply teaching a man to fish. Without trade, there is little point in making credit available. .
Part of our output is social capital, our research papers which are offered on a free to use basis by others . These include research which pioneered the deployment of social enterprise and micro-credit lending in Russia and resulted in the creation of 10,000 new businesses during the 5 years that the project ran.
I wanted to be sure that my suggestion was fully understood and came without conditions of becoming an IT supplier. This free local intelligence, about social enterprise development must surely have value for your Russian anti poverty program in reducing the cost of research that will otherwise be underwritten by your donors.
Sincerely,
Jeff Mowatt
As I described earlier this week, Oxfam, having commissioned research into impact investment, now come to the same conclusion. Rather than structuring investment around the needs of the investor it should be structured around the needs of the social enterprises tackling poverty.
That’s cold comfort for the man whose life was lost trying to leverage support and for the children that have since perished in the neglectful care of the state. Cold comfort for those whose lives have been lost in violent conflict after social unrest led to uprising , as the dead man warned
Today we even have the CEO of this organisation telling us “people should replace profit” as the bottom line in business. There are no shortage of “should be’s” with 6 figure salaries, our dead man was one who put it into practice.
Tomorrow at Skoll World Forum the lectern clinging elite will discuss this research. We can be assured that the debate will include no social enterprise practitioner from the trenches.
