Chapter 5: Social Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development in Emerging Economies

The emerging literature has been trying to provide an all-embracing definition for the concept of Social Entrepreneurship (SE) or the role of Social Enterprises (SEs). SE is a process by which citizens build or transform institutions to advance solutions to social problems by adopting enterprise strategies. It is a “creative destruction” that spurs innovation and economic change. SEs aim to solve many unaddressed growing societal problems in developing economies. In the above context, this study attempts to compare the social entrepreneurial activities across Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), considered as the big five emerging economies in early 2000. This study attempts to track the target activities of SE in the development of these countries. This study also aims to explore the role of SEs focusing on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study uses published reports, research articles and papers as sources. This study provides a comparison of socio-economic data of the BRICS block to identify the magnitude of the development challenge. In addition, the existing and past political systems of the block are compared to infer the role of SE initiatives. The comparison across the BRICS nations identifies that if the socio-economic data are unfavorable, it indicates the presence of social gaps and policy failures. In addition, the fastest-growing countries may experience widening gaps and environmental pressures, resulting in the emergence of SEs. This study provides a better understanding of SE initiatives and their contribution to the emerging economies. This study revealed that social enterprises are actively focusing on achieving SDGs in the BRICS block except for Russia. They have chosen fundamental issues causing inequality of income, gender, education, health, clean water, sanitation, clean energy, etc. This study indicates that the emerging economies may consider encouraging the SEs to solve many pressing issues.