ABSTRACT
Social enterprise, or social business, is a concept pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his proof-of-concept work in microfinance. As an experiment in the late 1970s, Yunus decided to make a small loan to a group of very poor women in Bangladesh who had minimal access to capital and could not get a loan from the bank because the loan increments were too high. Social enterprise is a uniquely powerful approach to systemic, holistic social change and its model is the backbone of all social ventures, from Samasource to SamaSchool and LXMI. In both the Samasource and LXMI case the work focuses on to people living in conditions of extreme poverty. But the give work model also has potential to make a real difference in more ‘developed’ economies.
