these are not interest free loans.
In fact, the interest rates are actually quite high.
But the emergence of microfinance really came
out of Muhammad Yunus wandering through a
village near Chittagong and Bangladesh and saying, why does it have to be like this?
Can't we figure out a better way
than money lenders for these incredible craftspeople
to finance their businesses? Now, I want to argue
that social entrepreneurship and what it really does is very much in keeping
with what we've talked about so far, that it's about finding
some stakeholders and creating value for them.
And it doesn't matter whether it's for profit,
like the Grameen Bank, or not for profit, like the Ashoka entrepreneurs.
Again, if you go to the Ashoka, Ashoka website, you'll find out more about
what they're doing, in a book by David Bornstein called, Building a Better World.
So, I want to redefine this
[INAUDIBLE]
this idea of social entrepreneurship, reorient it around the
story of business we've been creating. A stakeholder entrepreneur is somebody
who starts or improves an organization by making it responsive to a stakeholder's
needs or a set of stakeholder's needs. You can be a stakeholder
entrepreneur in an existing business or you can be one in
a start up.
Stakeholder entrepreneurs understand that their
organizations are firmly set within society.
They're not in some free market land,
and they're not just doing government programs.
They're set in society where they have clear stakeholders and clear purposes.
They also understand that they have to have a
business model that satisfies stakeholders and generates self-sustaining funds.
And it doesn't matter whether these funds go to shareholders, whether they is
satisfaction to donors but you gotta be able to essentially pay the bills.