ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a perspective on enterprise and poverty that takes a different approach than ‘Base of the Pyramid’, microcredit or ‘corporate social responsibility’ initiatives. I will use the joint terms ‘community-based entrepreneurship’ and ‘community-based enterprise’ to represent this different approach, drawing on a burgeoning literature that draws attention to its existence, its origins and character, and its potential. While this outlook sees entrepreneurship and its resulting enterprise as an instrument of poverty alleviation, the central point is that it is not an ‘exogenous approach’ but looks to ventures with four distinguishing characteristics. (1) They are endogenous grassroots activities and organizations that may in some way be identified with place-based, geographically defined communities. (2) Communities, in this account, are not merely the environment in which a form of entrepreneurship takes place; they are its primary agents. (3) They exhibit a collective form of entrepreneurship that results from the interrelationships among individuals, families and communities. (4) The enterprises they develop and operate are aimed at profit as a means to social, ecological, cultural and political ends for the community and its members. As with ‘social entrepreneurship’ and ‘social enterprise’, social outcomes are not merely positive externalities, but part of the explicit objective of these ventures (Defourny and Nyssens 2010; Peredo and McLean 2006). Entrepreneurship as an approach to poverty, in this perspective, is not a force brought from outside the society, it is not even a separate force within a society. It is a way in which forces within the society are marshalled by the society itself through collective action and brought to bear on the problem of poverty.
