African Social Entrepreneurship

African Social Entrepreneurship: Resources, Examples, and Blogs

African Social Business Venture Funding and Jobs
Finding and Funding African Innovators kudos to White African on a great article.

African Tech Jobs and African Tech Events are likewise helpful for emergent tech and social entrepreneurs.

Examples and Ideas for Social Entrepreneurship in Africa
Checking out Jonathan Gossier at Appfrica’s analysis of the Top 20 ideas for social entrepreneurship is helpful. Nathan Whitemore breaks down: 9) Peer to peer lending 10) Mobile desktop as a phone on his blog. Here is the list from Appfrica, without the examples.

01. Asynchronous Wireless Nodes (Mesh Networking)
02. Airtime Donations
03. Alternative Business Models for Airlines (like RyanAir in Europe)
05. Low cost alternative energy Automobiles
06. Call graphing and mobile user analytics (for NGOs, researchers, scientists)
07. Peer to Peer Lending
08. Book Recycling
09. RSS and Creative Commons to Print
10. Mobile Desktop as a Phone
11. Micro-Angel Investor/VC
12. Virtual World for Educating People About Foreign Cultures
13. Local Procurement Services
14. Communal Computers
15. Local Language Bloggers
16. Statistic Analysis and API’s
17. Infrastructure (Plumbing, Electricity, Roads)
18. Delivery/Courier Services
19. Human Offsets
20. Green Conversion

If you’re in this space the work of Design for the Other 90 Percent is not new, but the work of Technoserve, Kickstart, and International Development Enterprises (IDE) is pretty impressive in this area. In fact I’ve covered Technoserve’s work in Africa before in a post which explains their business model. Although, I’m curious whats taking place in the areas of water purification, public health, and mobile are percolating in Africa and more globally as well.

African Social Entrepreneurship Resources, Blogs, and News Updates
Of course blogs like Afri Gadget, White African, and Mobile Active are quite impressive in their coverage of the world of African social entrepreneurship.

In fact, the Mobile Directory at Mobile Active is a great resource for finding mobile technology thats being used broken down by geography and sector. Very cool resource.

Finally Social Edge has an overview of entrepreneurship in Africa and the World Resources Institute has a great whitepaper/report called “The Next Four Billion” and has great case study material. The other entrepreneurship publications at the World Resources Institute can be helpful to social business visionaries as well.

African Social Business Trends and Metrics
Finally my article on the trends in social entrepreneurship in 2009 has a little bit of insight on this issue. Nathan Whittemore covered this issue in long form–here is his recap of social entrepreneurship trends for 2009. One of the issues I discussed was the issue of metrics and analytics–apparently there is new software based on Salesforce to do this work more efficiently–I image such technology will be adopted domestically to analyze the success of various social entreprenurial business ventures in Africa.

If you have anything to add in terms of insight or ideas…feel free to leave a comment…