Find the full report here.
Facilitation partner: McKinsey & Company
Partners: Ashoka, Catalyst 2030, Echoing Green, Schwab Foundation and the Skoll Foundation
With multiple compounding crises to navigate simultaneously, governments across the world are facing the pressure to become faster and better at achieving societal goals. Delivering on goals such as access to quality healthcare and education, environ- mental sustainability or a balanced recovery from the pandemic will require changes to existing societal systems. This is because the underlying challenges are systemic in nature – and the required changes can be beneficial, not just from a societal but also an economic perspective.
Systems social entrepreneurs can be key allies for governments in bringing about these structural changes. Many social entrepreneurs take a systemic approach to solving societal issues – we call them ‘systems social entrepreneurs’ throughout this report. As society’s R&D lab, they work to change policies, practices, power dynamics, social norms or mindsets that currently hinder progress. They apply participative, people-centric ways of developing solutions to deliver innovative approaches, which can be a great complement
to governments’ macro-level perspectives and can offer financial benefits for societies. For example, the financial benefit that systems social entrepreneurs could generate under the Ashoka umbrella in Germany alone has been estimated to be over EUR 18 billion (USD 21 billion) per year.1 Moreover, their presence in and trust-based relationships with vulnerable communities make them important partners in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Governments are also in a unique position to enable change. They hold the key to changing many societal systems by institutionalising successful innovations developed by systems social entrepreneurs to reach all their con-stituents, for example, by translating them into policies or adopting them in government programmes. By evolving existing administrative practices, governments can create the supportive ecosystems that systems social entrepreneurs need to develop more of these innovative solutions.
As transformation guides who can mobilise diverse coalitions around a shared vision, systems social entrepreneurs could even improve the legitimacy and accountability of policy processes.
‘Social entrepreneurs are not content with giving people fish, or teaching people how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionised the fishing industry.’
Bill Drayton, Founder of Ashoka, USA
Governments can act in five areas to create supportive ecosystems that unlock the potential of systems social entrepreneurs:
- Leverage the power of information by sharing and co-creating data.
Build capabilities among civil servants and systems social entrepreneurs to enable
mutual understanding and collaboration.
- Develop funding models that recognise the characteristics of systems social entrepreneurs.
- Promote collaboration between public sector organisations and between the public, private and social sectors.
- Foster institutionalisation by co-creating or adopting successful innovations.
For each of these areas, this report outlines concrete recommendations and provides real-life examples of changes that governments around the world have implemented. It builds on discussions with more than 50 government representatives and systems social entrepreneurs around the world. While our examples focus on national governments, they can also be applied to local and international levels. Coordinated efforts across all levels of government could further boost the impact of the actions proposed here.
