By Daniel Shin
Entrepreneurs can help challenge inequality. We ought to provide access to resources and education and create platforms for learning and collaboration. Social entrepreneurship is all about creating economic opportunities and promoting sustainable business practices, not one-off projects, by prioritizing long-term social and environmental impact.
There must be more socially conscious entrepreneurs who can drive policy entrepreneurship. System-level changes must be done with the power of social entrepreneurship, especially in the underprivileged communities of the Global South. It shall be much effectively done by educating and co-designing with the most vulnerable in those communities to ensure solutions are most effective.
Seventy-seven percent of the world’s population is in poverty. They are at the bottom of the social pyramid. Entrepreneurship can make a difference. An old friend of mine, an Indian entrepreneur who I got to know in Silicon Valley has such an inspiring story.
His background is deeply rooted in Dalit, a term used for untouchables and outcasts who represented the lowest stratum of the castes in the Indian subcontinent. Many Dalits work as casual day laborers in small factories, quarries, brick kilns or on construction sites, as cycle rickshaw drivers or in petty trade. My friend was nobody and a modern-day slave.
This poor Indian friend gained simple technical skills from a local education center organized by Methodist missionaries. He got a small part-time job at a tiny information technology service company in Dharavi, a poor neighborhood in Mumbai, as a data administrator after he was able to take this course. He earned small petty cash to buy a one-way ticket to California.
After he moved to California, he got a job at a small startup company founded by Indian immigrants. He lived almost 40 miles away from his office. He had no money to buy a car, so he had to commute by bike for a year, spending a few hours back and forth. Later, this company was sold at a small profit and my friend made handsome money from his stock options. It was not huge, but big enough for him to afford an old secondhand Chevy.
He then got another job with a slightly increased salary. One day, he met an Indian gentleman at The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a nonprofit organization nurturing the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs. This gentleman gave my friend a small grant, which later became seed money to start his own cybersecurity service company. His company later raised investments from venture capital firms and was sold to another big internet security company for $1 billion.
Now, he does what he loves to do and also pays things forward with gratitude to nurture the next generation of Indian innovators. This transformative experience happened in less than 10 years. He could have been nobody special. But now, he is somebody very important.
All I want to say is the power of education. If he didn’t take this education opportunity at a local community center or if he didn’t invest all he had to fly over to California or if he didn’t take an entrepreneurial endeavor by himself, he could have never become someone no one thought he would be now. This is a truly life-transforming story.
We don’t need a fancy degree from a prestigious college to become an entrepreneur. What we need is the kind of education that simultaneously improves the quality of life both of individuals and the wider society. Combining technology and entrepreneurship, or technopreneurship for short, is important for economic growth, social development and competitive advantage.
To create grassroots change in underprivileged communities, policymakers and social entrepreneurs have to create a relevant entrepreneurship education experience for underserved youth. We need more social catalysts who are passionate about scaling the impact and improving the outcomes with their own social ventures. Education can be a launching pad for that.
L'École 42, a free programming school network founded by Xavier Niel, a self-made French billionaire in the telecommunication industry, is considered an international benchmark for training in digital skills.
L'École 42 serves its mission in 42 nations worldwide. Studies are free. There are no academic exams, no preparatory path, no diploma required and no upper age limit. I am very inspired by this story and want to do the same to grow METES, an educational social venture domiciled in Wales. It will nurture the next generation of changemakers, envisioning to grow this community at a global scale like L'École 42.
Socioeconomic equity is a complex concept. We need to build capacities to better understand and meet the physical, social and emotional needs of underprivileged communities. By creating a highly esteemed community-based learning experience, more people can form a strategy and create tactical movement opportunities to incentivize participation in new industries for groups that were disproportionately impacted by existing policy measures.
It is a long way to go, but with the like-minded makers, this journey would be much easier. By bridging between knowledge and experience and between entrepreneurship and innovation, social entrepreneurs can effectively mobilize resources and develop their ideas into tangible actions while they are associated with a community-based learning experience.
Entrepreneurship education needs an extreme makeover to recruit and educate changemakers from all walks of life. We hope to see a great legacy building upon our history, quality of cohort and their global impact. We need to find a way to make more people effectively serve, engage and empower future changemakers who can grow their business and become policy entrepreneurs at some point in their life.
Daniel Shin is a venture capitalist and senior luxury fashion executive, overseeing corporate development at MCM, a German luxury brand. He also teaches at Korea University.
English (United States) ·