How Do You Scale a Social Enterprise?

FSG’s inclusive markets team works to develop and scale inclusive business models to create new opportunities and better lives for the global poor. The inclusive markets approach has been successfully applied to low-income housing and decentralized water plants in India, and can be applied to a range of other sectors and geographies.

There are so many brilliant minds working to develop innovative solutions to improve conditions all over the world. But what separates the business ideas that are able to make an impact on millions of lives from the ones that may only reach a few hundred people is an ability to scale.

As any social entrepreneur knows, achieving scale is no easy feat. Social entrepreneurs face a variety of barriers that cannot be tackled alone.

With the help of “industry facilitators,” enterprises can overcome these obstacles and make a meaningful difference to a larger number of people in need.

Watch The Power of Industry Facilitation: Bringing Market-Based Solutions to Scale above to hear the story of Maya, a social entrepreneur who is faced with the challenge of bringing her solar lantern business to a larger scale of poor, rural families who are currently dependent on expensive and potentially unsafe kerosene lanterns.

This video, made possible by funding from the Omidyar Network, highlights themes from the report Beyond the Pioneer, published by DTTIPL in April 2014 under the research and authorship of Harvey Koh, Nidhi Hegde, and Ashish Karamchandani. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learn more about FSG’s inclusive markets approach > 

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