Building the Business-Social Bridge: Lessons from Nairobi

At the Ashoka-Lemelson Mobile Tech gathering in Nairobi this past June I spent three days in conversations with 8 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows working with, you guessed it, mobile technologies.

One theme that came up over and over was the belief that corporate and/or business partnerships are key to sustainability and spread in the world of social entrepreneurship.  Partnership in this case includes everything from co-branding, to donations, to revenue-sharing models and more.

The validity of this belief will make for a great debate in another post on Ashoka Tech; but the reality is, for all of the talk about business-social partnership, executing such partnerships takes a lot of work, communication, and alignment of values. The relationships can be confusing, frustrating, and very complex.

Some of the Fellows in Nairobi partner with or have revenue sharing partnerships with service providing businesses.  Some Fellows were actively seeking out partnerships at the time, but were unsure as to how to begin.  Others were dealing with businesses wanting to engage, but completely at a loss for how to best work with the social entrepreneurs.

What I took away from the discussions was that social entrepreneurs, and the businesses wanting to engage with them, need some good role models and some practical rules for engagement that can guide both parties through value alignment, expectation-setting exercises and financial negotiations. 

Ashoka's Full Economic Citizenship program is working on turning this wish list into a reality and they've made astounding progress in the fields of health, agriculture, and housing.  There is a great deal more to do however and I look forward to the day when successful business-social partnerships are a norm rather than an exception to the rule.

What are your ideas for improving business-social partnership?  What are some great examples that you have seen of successful business-social partnerships?

Photo by: flickr/dani920 (From Left: Ashoka Staff, Lily Paul; Ashoka Lemelson Fellow, Joseph Adelegan)