Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship means identifying or recognizing a social problem and using entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a social venture to achieve a desired social change.

Youth social entrepreneurship is an increasingly common approach to engaging youth voice in solving social problems. Youth organizations and programs promote these efforts through a variety of incentives to young people. LEAP Africa’s Annual Nigerian Youth Leadership Awards and the forthcoming Youth in Social Enterprise Conference are perfect examples of programmes that promotes the efforts of social entrepreneurs. The programmes strengthens, supports and celebrates the role of young people in creating positive change in their communities.

LEAP Africa annually celebrates social entrepreneurs and a host of other youth engaging in change projects in their communities and contributing to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria.

The internet and social networking websites have been pivotal resources for the success and collaboration of many Social Entrepreneurs. A lot of these social entrepreneurs utilize the platform of the social media to interface with other young people across the globe to further consult on the many possible solutions to the existing challenges in the world. These media allow ideas to be heard by broader audiences, help networks and investors to develop globally, and achieve their goals with little or no start-up capital. In addition the internet allows for the pooling of design resources using open source principles. For example, the rise of open-source appropriate technology as a sustainable development paradigm enables people all over the world to collaborate on solving local problems just as open source software development leverage on collaboration.

Over the years LEAP has provided support for social entrepreneurs to further their change projects and aspirations and has linked them with available networks and resources to bolster their efforts.