This is the first time I attended the Social Enterprise World Forum and the highlight for me was a confirmation that collaboration is key in succeeding as a social enterprise, no matter where you are in the world and what you do.

Helene Malandain, Ākina Foundation & SEWF

I’m from the Ākina Foundation in New Zealand and am Chair of the Social Enterprise World Forum board.

My biggest takeaway so far is that we really have to make sure that we listen to the communities, because it’s not a question of reinventing the way we work together and we do business.

It’s really about understanding what wellbeing looks like to them because they know best.

Avis Mulhall, UNDP in Somalia.

The biggest takeaway from this particular SEWF conference was how important it is to consider traditional ways of living and being when we’re looking to the future and how we can actually create such a more beautiful future together when we marry our technologies with Indigenous ways of being.

Kat Dunn, Grameen Australia

My key highlight or insight from the Social Enterprise World Forum was around entrepreneurial income generation solutions of refugees and migrants.

The entrepreneurial refugee network in the UK said that 70 million people are forcibly displaced globally, but host societies are failing to include these people. So these displaced migrants are solving the problems by themselves.

Twenty percent of this community are starting their own businesses and the ones that become viable, they employ up to six people; yet only 1% of government investment is going towards supporting these businesses. I think that is a key opportunity, not just for the European and African countries, but for Australia as well to invest in migrants and refugees to create employment opportunities.

Shayamoli Mazumder, Organisation For Women’s Development

I came from Bangladesh. Our organisation name is Organisation For Women’s Development in Bangladesh. We’ve done some social service work now for last four years. We are doing social entrepreneurship as well with 600 rural agriculture based women. I came here with a question that if social entrepreneurs are profit-making organisations like corporate houses, how can the grassroots women come out from the poverty circle?

I offered a question to the social investment panelists as to whether it is possible to make a system where the profit from social entrepreneurship could be distributed to the grassroots women, by those women who are working for social entrepreneurship? Like a cooperative society, everyone could share the social entrepreneur’s profit.

They could have a bank account after one year when we count the profit and loss, then some profit could go to also their account so they can scale off from the poverty circle. Otherwise social entrepreneurs will be a false thing like the current system. It will be a simply a false thing, like a corporate house. Only personal profit making, not for the actual poor people, especially for women. So from Bangladesh, please do something for the poor women, those that stay in the poverty cycle, in the name of social entrepreneurship, don’t exploit them. Thank you so much.

Chogazen InDaba, Detele Foundation

I am from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m the Founder and the Director of Detele Foundation, which is a organisation that works with young women and girls to help them build resilience. I love the culture here. I love the differences and the sharing of information and skills and how we can move forward in getting our businesses up and together and most especially for us who are grassroots. The ideas of how we pull ourselves up and try and have a creative business mind instead of thinking of ourselves as charities. So I’m really excited. It has been very, very fruitful and I look forward to next year.

Stephen Johnson, British Council

From this year, I think there’s a real movement, especially in this region of the world, for a social enterprise sector and a social economy and I’m really looking forward to seeing it develop in the next five to 10 years.