ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates alternative modes of sectoral blending in international development, and what this paradigm means for the trajectory of development cooperation. It examines the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship and defines it in its regional contexts. The chapter focuses on the Acumen Fund, a pioneer in venture philanthropy, which aims to deploy private-sector expertise, and practice, to foster enterprise solutions to poverty and social exclusion in urban and rural communities. It presents one of Acumen's early social ventures, the A to Z Textile Mills, which like the case studies that have preceded it in this thesis, uses the public-private partnerships (PPP) model, but with an important qualification: that the outcome is a privately operated, for-profit industrial concern backed by philanthropic capital. The chapter finally draws these threads together and offers some tentative conclusions on what such projects might mean for the direction of philanthropy as a prelude.
