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Social enterprises and decreasing vulnerability
The issue in the framework of UNDP Bratislava
Regional Centres priorities
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Outline

• What is BRC doing
• Approach to vulnerability
• Why economy is seen as appropriate for decreasing
  vulnerability?
• Next steps

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BRC architecture and territorial coverage

• Three thematic dimensions (practices) with set
  of sub-practices
• Democratic governance
• Environmental
• Poverty
• HD, MDGs and poverty monitoring (with social
  inclusion increasingly gaining in significance)
• Civil society engagement for poverty alleviation
• MDG support
• Private business engagement, UN Secretary General
  Global Compact Initiative
• Poverty reduction and trade
• Cross-cutting areas
• Gender
• ICT
• HIV/AIDS
• Country support team

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Why involved in the RBEC region? Major challenges

• Strong core-periphery disparities
• Working poor phenomenon
• Unreformed social services
• Old industrialized regions (depressive urban
  areas)
• Single-factory towns poverty
• Rural poverty
• Increase in inequality
• Emergence of visible of losers of transition
  (vulnerable groups)

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Why involved in the region? Increase in inequality
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Approach to vulnerability who are vulnerable?

• Group affiliation
• Roma? IDPs? Women? Youth?
• Individual status dimension
• Disabled
• Pre-retirement age unemployed
• Long-term unemployed
• Level of education, qualification
• Single parents
• Functional dimension
• Isolation (inaccessible social and physical
  environment)
• Access (lack of) to basic infrastructures

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Dealing with vulnerability addressing

• Poverty and the risk of falling into poverty (not
  just monetary)
• Lack of educational opportunities
• Inadequate personal (physical) security,
• Poor housing
• Poor access to health care
• Closely related to the concept of human
  security (security beyond security of
  nation-states borders)

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Closer look at HD and HS perspective to
vulnerability

• Vulnerability as a set of
• Socio-economic risks (household dimension)
• Personal risks (individual dimension)
• Environmental risks (territorial and spatial
  dimension)
• Vulnerability as capacity deficits to
• identify and avoid threats
• Identify group-specific and factor-specific
  instruments to attenuate their consequences

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Social enterprises as an instrument to address
vulnerability

• Entities sharing characteristics of business and
  NGO/CSO sector
• Main objective achieving social goals and not
  profit (NGO face)
• Major instrument for reaching the objective
  operation following business models
• Dual role of the target group
• Active participants
• Major client
• Particularly suitable for excluded groups
• Different from
• Market providers of social services
• Entities distributing social assistance

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Unlike targeted group approach, social
enterprises can

• Target the assistance and increase both its
  effectiveness and efficiency
• Provide wide range of positive externalities
• Actively involve the communities
• Decrease free riders perception and thus
  improve social cohesion
• Decrease dependency
• Decrease overall costs of addressing
  vulnerability and social inclusion
• Be group neutral and open to various vulnerable
  groups
• Falls into EC priority work on social economy

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Why social enterprises for vulnerable groups? The
Roma

• Social inclusion of Roma faces problems
• despite the plethora of initiatives?
• Because of the plethora of initiatives?
• Policies so far contributing to dependence
• Capacity of the stakeholders rarely being
  developed
• Strong corporate interests involved in Roma
  inclusion
• vulnerability-based approach necessary
  targeting Roma because they are vulnerable and
  not because they are Roma
• Social enterprises can be helpful to decrease
  dependency and social distance

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The current project

• A regional initiative launched by BRC in 2006 to
  assess the feasibility and practice of Social
  Enterprises in NMS, the Western Balkans, and the
  CIS
• Set of national studies in a regional framework
• Common denominator post-socialist specifics of
  the third sector
• Country specifics address nationally-relevant
  challenges regarding vulnerability and social
  inclusion

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The regional component

• Introduces regionally adequate definitions of
  social enterprises
• Estimates contributions of social enterprises to
  the process of social inclusion (both from a
  social and economic point of view)
• Suggests criteria for measurement (three economic
  and three social criteria).
• Economic
• An economic activity producing goods and/or
  selling services
• A degree of autonomy
• A trend towards paid work
• Social
• An explicit aim to benefit the community or a
  specific group of people
• Decision-making power not based on capital
  ownership
• Exclusion of profit-maximising organizations

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The future perspectives

• Within this particular project
• Future support to legal frameworks (in Poland and
  Serbia)
• Launch of publication in Barcelona
• Project Development based on findings
• Broader framework
• Constituting social economy as a programmatic
  area of BRC
• Integrating the work on supporting social economy
  into overall vulnerability-targeted endeavors
• Linking social enterprises to social inclusion
  monitoring (sets of indicators, monitoring
  frameworks)