Great social enterprise models: Bulungula

In this series, I will be sharing some of the innovative and effective ways that we see people use entrepreneuralism and innovation to achieve social goals.

Bulungula, right, is a backpackers hostel in the Transkei, one of South Africa's most remote and traditional regions. It is environmentally sustainable - making use of rocket parafin showers, earth toilets, and solar power - and is socially integrated within the local community.

The local village owns 40% of the venture and villagers are able to make a living from working at the hostel - cooking, cleaning and running community-owned businesses for tourists such as horse riding and caneoing. It has been a big success to date and created some 35 jobs.

Bulungula was started by Dave Martin who wanted to test whether backpacker tourism could be used as an effective poverty-fighting tool. Since then, Dave and his team have set up the Bulungula Incubator to support the development of more community-owned businesses and to share their learnings with other rural communities and development projects.

This concept resonates closely with the work that Eastside does. I fell in love with this place when I visited as a tourist in 2007. And Eastside has now made a small investment in Bulungula's latest project to build a school in the community. You can see the progress here and also donate.

So what makes Bulungula a great social enterprise model?

Well, the thing that stood out for me was the quality of the experience for the back-packer. And this is a vital ingredient - perhaps the key criteria for success - for any successful and sustainable social business. Bulungula achieves this by placing great care and attention on the small things from the warm welcome you receive on arrival, to the artwork in the lodges and the quality of the food. My girlfriend still raves about the banana and toffee pancakes on their village tour! The quality of the experience means that tourists keep returning and I suspect will ensure the economic viability of the venture in the long term.

This is the great challenge for social entrepreneurs. How do you create a high quality product/service while working with people who maybe suffering from multiple disavantages? This takes single-mindedness, perserverance and more time than you expect. You get this right and you've cracked it!

Can social innovation competitions move beyond the hype and deliver change?

Reality TV shows such as Dragons' Den and The Apprentice have captured the public imagination. They have also inspired a wave of business support programmes that adopt the competitive, high-pressure and high-profile characteristics of these shows.

Despite the many competitions that are now organised in the social economy to distribute money, mentoring and support to voluntary organisations and social enterprises, not much research yet exists about the impact or value of these competitions.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize winner and social entrepreneur, is an advocate and imagines competitions as an effective means of generating creative solutions to social and ecological challenges. He imagines '...local, regional, and even global competitions, with hundreds or thousands of participants vying to create the most practical, ambitious, and exciting concepts for social businesses.'

But insiders have voiced healthy scepticism. And let's face it when another announcement of an awards ceremony for social enterprise lands in the inbox it is hard to resist the temptation to discard as junk.

So what's the answer here?

In the last twelve months, we have designed and delivered two social enterprise competitions (Spark and Equal-Invest), and so I am particularly keen to explore the value they offer to building the capacity of social enterprise.

As a starting point, we have recently published an article which seeks to explore the question in more depth. For this piece, we reviewed competitions run by organisations such as NESTA (Big Green Challenge), the Social Enterprise Coalition (Enterprising Solutions Awards), the Big Lottery Fund (People's 50 Millions), McKinsey (SocialStart), Ashoka (Changemakers) and NESsT.

Generalisations are hard to make because of the variety of competitions, but nonetheless we found that social competitions can move beyond the hype when their high profile is used to generate more funding, more support and access to new networks for social entrepreneurs. In the right circumstances, when the programmes are well-implemented, and when they encourage cooperation over competition, they can have a lasting impact.

We would welcome your thoughts and experiences and any further ideas you may have on how to make business support more effective for social enterprises.

Read the article in full here
www.eastsideconsulting.co.uk/downloads/social-innovation-competition.pdf

Read more here
http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competitions
http://www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk/
http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/prog_the_peoples_50_million.htm
http://www.edgeupstarts.org/2008/about
http://www.enterprisingsolutions.org/
http://www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk/
http://www.nesst.org/competition/default.asp
http://www.sparkchallenge.org/
http://www.startsocial.de/