In layman’s terms, social entrepreneurs are changemakers who see patterns around them, identify problem areas, and pursue novel ideas into an application that can help solve problems in their communities and beyond. Their need to drive social change with a lasting, transformational benefit to society sets them apart. What COVID-19 has done is to focus attention on the need for social entrepreneurship.
Social entrepreneurship can be termed as a revolution for the good of all. People are beginning to realise and understand the need to solve problems, building teams and bring about change in their own communities. We no longer dwell in a society where you can repeat a skill or profession without being able to adapt to or practice change.
Pivotal to change
Social transformation begins with the personal and India today needs social entrepreneurs to pave the way. As leaders of tomorrow, young people are pivotal to change and have been contributing to solving some critical problems across the globe. The Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 recognise that the youth have a strong ability to bring about change and more than one-third of the SDG’s focus area involves youth explicitly. Once they have realised their power, they pull together a team and iteratively evolve the idea and the approach until there is a change in context or the community.
The world today is in search of young leaders who are not only capable of addressing emerging needs but also committed to ‘realising’ a new future that paves the way for a regenerative paradigm of existence. The field of social entrepreneurship has always needed more talented, passionate, and experienced entrepreneurs. If accomplished at scale, youth social entrepreneurship can be an effective solution to bridge the talent gap. By the time the young people who have previously started their ventures become adults, they have gained valuable hands-on experience navigating the formidable challenges for creating social impact.
Despite this, our institutions still believe in age-old tradition of grading systems. Schools continue to focus on grades and standardised test scores as the primary indicators of ‘success’. Schools and the wider education system need to reimagine how our young people are growing up and create a new definition of success. To democratise this new paradigm, our education system needs to centrally focus on empowering young people as empathetic changemakers. To do that, educational institutions need to develop curriculums which cater to the developmental needs of the society to incubate, guide and nurture young minds towards changemaking. We can achieve this by having every school and community do more to encourage young people to practice change so that it becomes natural for young people to start things.
The writer is Co-founder & Global Director, Ashoka Young Changemakers.
