The Editor's Post: What we can learn from women social entrepreneurs

Julie Pybus 1st November 2024

Founding a social enterprise is "like having two babies at once": at Ashoka's GetWISER Summit 2024, we hear about the brilliant women social entrepreneurs overcoming challenges on a daily basis – and why we need to change how we measure impact. This week's view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.

This week I had the honour of hosting the opening session of the GetWISER Summit 2024, Ashoka’s online two-day event to celebrate and support women social entrepreneurs all around the world.

I interviewed Ashoka’s Women’s Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship – or WISE – movement’s founder, Dr Iman Bibars, about her 30 years of supporting women entrepreneurs and why it’s important to rethink how we measure success in social enterprise. Dr Bibars explained that too often funders, the media and others are focused on solely the numbers, but it’s also important to show how social changemakers make an impact in ways that are less easily quantifiable, such as influencing policy and transforming mindsets, and she had some great examples to share. You can read more about them on Ashoka’s website here. I hope that the solutions journalism approach, which we follow at Pioneers Post and which is gaining traction around the world, can help reframe how some of these stories are told. You can read more about this in our feature, Five ways the media can support the impact economy.

(Note that Ashoka’s WISE movement is not related to our WISE programme – although we share the same goals: to empower and celebrate women social entrepreneurs.)

Impact measurement is, of course, a topic that is under constant debate in the impact movement, and our recent SE100 Social Business Coffee Breaks webinar on the subject was our most popular one yet – if you missed it, check out our video and article.

Some amazing women took to the virtual stage during the GetWISER Summit. One comment that I’m sure will resonate with many of you was from Priya Agrawal, the founder of Antarang Foundation, who said: “Setting up a social enterprise is all-consuming. It’s like having two babies at once and bringing them up.”

Running a social enterprise is no easy task, and sometimes policy-makers make it even more challenging. This week’s budget from the UK government provided a good example. To pay for the government’s planned massive outlay to repair the country’s embattled public services and infrastructure, the chancellor announced a swathe of tax rises. One of these was in the national insurance tax that employers must pay. This will undoubtedly be painful for many social enterprises. There were, however, some reasons to be optimistic as my colleague points out in her Budget 2024 analysis.

This week's top stories

Budget 2024: UK Government will create social impact investment vehicle to deliver its missions

Impact 101: What is place-based impact investing?

The Impact World this Week: 24 October 2024

Top image: Freepik.

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