What development has occurred in the Malaysian social impact sector and where are opportunities emerging?

I feel the environment in the Malaysian social impact sector is a bit up and down. Back in 2018, there was an initiative to establish a chamber of social enterprise development. We saw a lot of social innovation projects became social enterprises and later on, founders put money towards these social enterprises and made them social business for their charity arms.

I could see there was a moment where, at a certain time, the landscape of social enterprise began to be set aside by the mainstream, just because they didn’t understand what a social business is.

Then, the government changed and assigned the social business supervision from one ministry to another ministry. I can see the current situation is developing, and a lot of social innovation projects are being accepted by social enterprise accreditation entities. I saw very recently there were few organisations (who were start-ups of social businesses) go to the next phase of their business where they’re growing their business, not only in Malaysia, but also expanding towards other countries. I would say this ecosystem seems to be still developing but is well facilitated by the government. I believe as a social business, we should not only think about how the government or how corporates are supporting us, but how we create opportunities and how they could bring challenges or catalyse bigger change in the community at large.

We don’t really depend on the assistance from the government and the sponsorship from corporate, but we really hold our social business canvas so we can explore everything. I believe that good social business will be getting support, not only from the community, but will also be highlighted and supported by the government and private sector. I believe this sector is developing well in Malaysia, and I’m looking forward for the future where the social business could play on the same league together with others in the business sector.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

Recently, we were working on a global social crowdfunding platform, a marketplace, and also engaging volunteers for social businesses. This project we [originally] named Khayr Well, and Khayr in Arabic means good deeds. This initiative is now named ActioNow, and is inspired with success stories.

we train them starting from how they can do crowdfunding, and then later on we don’t make them depend on the donation or the funds from the crowdfunding platform, but we train them to sell their product online.

Once they sell the product online, they started to collect more people to support them. Everybody who buys their products on the platform become the supporter of the social business. I can see how this particular organisation, coming from a very small initiative in Malaysia, are selling their services, not products. The product is an online product, but they sell the services and provide a solution for civil society sector organisations and resolve the challenges that this sector is facing.

I can see how they morph their fund and how they started to develop themselves as a social business and sell their product online. They are providing services, creative services for the third sector. The third sector doesn’t have much funds for expensive projects, like developing applications or managing social media. How they do this is they put the opportunity on their platform and then they look for e-volunteers from all over the world. These e-volunteers are begging to work for this initiative, and they provide the fees for these e-volunteers. The e-volunteers on another site need to prove they are from vulnerable communities or unemployed people. This is actually how they provide for them from donations, they link to a social initiative, innovation and provide the solution or the good job opportunity for the unemployed people and the vulnerable committee. This is inspiring as much as catalysing change, this changemaker is bringing a more sustainable impact for communities.