Acting for Life – Enterprise

Catalyst for innovative social enterprises

Enterprises to produce
… social benefits
Launched in 2009, « Acting for Life Entreprise » aims to support organizations from the South in setting up and developing innovative enterprises designed to meet the needs of vulnerable people, especially in mega-cities and intermediate towns.

Why this new initiative?

Social enterprise can be a powerful and effective tool to meet basic needs, without perpetual dependence on external funding. Like micro-finance institutions, which have demonstrated that it is possible to give the poorest access to appropriate financial services by setting up sound, specialist banking enterprises, social enterprise initiatives have been emerging in various fields over the last few years.

Very often, the initiators of these projects face problems in terms of management, organization, understanding the market or technical skills which jeopardize their chances of achieving both their social objectives and financial sustainability. How can an educational workshop for former prisoners or prostitutes undergoing rehabilitation become a profitable work-integration social enterprise? How can a local housing foundation come up with a sustainable economic model? How can a fragile mutual aid society be turned into an insurance company?

In response to these questions,
Acting for Life – Enterprise

• identifies innovative projects which can be replicated and which attempt to meet the clearly identified need of a vulnerable group; and
• helps them to achieve financial autonomy within the market economy.

Activities

Acting for Life is gradually putting in place a cluster of resources, made up of major partner companies, management schools, investment funds and specialist consultants, to provide:

• technical expertise in various corporate areas (management, finance, planning, human resources, marketing, etc.) ;
• fundraising services (grants, loans, capital contribution);
• tools for monitoring and evaluating corporate performance;
• networking, to encourage sharing of experience and dissemination of good practice;
• assistance with establishing alliances between existing grassroots organizations and large companies, which make a joint commitment to combat exclusion.

Initial focus

Keeping faith with the development approach followed for the last 30 years, Acting for Life prioritizes enterprise projects started by local organizations, rather than individual initiatives or attempts by large companies simply to expand their market towards the "bottom of the pyramid".

Two sectors have been chosen to launch the start-up phase: micro-insurance and work-integration social enterprises in Mexico and India.