ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a novel inter-organizational form that recommends as an alternative to tackling issues of poverty alleviation and sustainable entrepreneurship. Businesses founded by low-income sections of the population face many challenges from lack of expertise for their development, to lack of resources for their implementation, through to lack of performance measurements, goal alignment and standardization to accomplish growth. Social franchising emerges as a network of alliances among small-scale companies, but at the same time it offers the big-scale ones that are needed to attract capital, exploit economies of scale, enhance rapid growth, and exploit network and other effects. Social franchising could offer compelling solutions to address the problems of unemployment, social exclusion of groups and poverty, and problems of fiscal deficits and unsatisfied social needs that the public sector and non-governmental organizations have failed to tackle.
