Provide regulatory framework for social entrepreneurs
Operators of social enterprises have called on the government to provide a regulatory framework to streamline the activities of social entrepreneurs in the country.
The move, according to them would help with the establishment of effective systems to attract the right investors to expand Ghana’s economy in the near future.
The operators made the call at a forum to launch the social entrepreneurs group in Accra.
The participants took turns to share their ideas on how businesses and the country as a whole could embrace social enterprise concept to improve their operations.
A participant, Mr Stephen Gyesi, told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS after the launch that, the economies of developed countries were performing well because they had embraced social enterprise.
“A country like Great Britain is able to generate £3.5 billion annually because the country adopted social enterprise”, he said adding that “I am optimistic that Ghana would be able to turn its fortunes around if the concept is fully embraced,” he said.
He said there were investors in the country ready to sink money into the economy but wwere holding back because of the lack of what he described as “effective systems to secure their investment.”
Another participant, Mr James Kofi Annan, bemaoned the lack of laws to regulate non-governmental organisations in the country.
“I am disappointed that in Ghana there are no laws to regulate activities of NGOs, apart from the registrar general’s which only regulates the registration requirement of an NGO,” he said.
According to him, the notion that entrepreneurs especially those who run NGO’s would always be begging for financial support to operate their institutions must change.
Mr William Senyo, a participant, added that the industry presently needed a friendlier regulatory frame work to help the sector create a good name for the country to acknowledge the full potential of the concept.
He advised social entrepreneurs to adopt self-regulatory processes such as good governance, good management and transparency in their organisation.
Sustainable social impact
Speaking at the launch, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder of SE Ghana, Madam Amma Lartey, said the model would enable social entrepreneurs to achieve sustainable social impact.
“While there are many strong social entrepreneurs in Ghana working to tackle a variety of issues, and organisations supporting them yet the sector is not well organised and many social enterprises remain small,” she noted.
“It is exciting to see what began as grassroots movements now develop into an industry group, we believe that the private sector needs to be the driver of development in Ghana and social enterprise enables this development to happen in a deliberate sustainable way,” she added.
The Executive Director of SE Ghana, Madam Adadzewa Otoo, on her part said although the initiative of SE Ghana were led by social entrepreneurs, her outfit would partner with corporate institutions and government to ensure the programme become successful.
“We see many opportunities to drive social and business objectives through win-win partnerships,” she said.
Launch of social enterprises
Social Entrepreneurs Ghana (SE Ghana) in partnership with the Reach for Change, the British Council, Impact Hub, TedxAccra and other social organsation launched the first group for social enterprises in the country.
The aim of SE Ghana is to organise and develop a strong ecosystem for the social enterprise sector by increasing funding, driving policy, intensifying learning and innovation as well as ensuring that there is adequate research and data information on the sector.
Social entrepreneurs are individuals who address society’s most pressing social and environmental problems through the use of business strategies.
Branding in the age of Social Media
Subculture and participants’ intensive interactions move seamlessly among the web, physical spaces, and traditional media.
Together members are pushing forward new ideas, products, practices, and aesthetics—bypassing mass-culture gatekeepers. With the rise of crowdculture, cultural innovators and their early adopter markets have become one and the same.
Turbocharged art worlds
Producing innovative popular entertainment requires a distinctive mode of organisation—what sociologists call an art world. In art worlds, artists (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and so on) gather in inspired collaborative competition: They work together, learn from one another, play off ideas, and push one another.
The collective efforts of participants in these “scenes” often generate major creative breakthroughs. Before the rise of social media, the mass-culture industries (film, television, print media, fashion) thrived by pilfering and repurposing their innovations.
Crowdculture has turbocharged art worlds, vastly increasing the number of participants and the speed and quality of their interactions. No longer do you need to be part of a local scene; no longer do you need to work for a year to get funding and distribution for your short film.
Now millions of nimble cultural entrepreneurs come together online to hone their craft, exchange ideas, fine-tune their content, and compete to produce hits.
The net effect is a new mode of rapid cultural prototyping, in which you can get instant data on the market’s reception of ideas, have them critiqued, and then rework them so that the most resonant content quickly surfaces. In the process, new talent emerges and new genres form.
Squeezing into every nook and cranny of pop culture, the new content is highly attuned to audiences and produced on the cheap. These art-world crowdcultures are the main reason why branded content has failed.