"The scale of the challenges we face today is still daunting," and "very few of these solutions reach the necessary scale."
That's the takeaway from Scaling Up Development Impact, a new book that looks at how social enterprises can help solve some of the world's biggest problems.
"There is a rich landscape of social enterprises solving the problems of poverty at local levels around the world," the book's authors write, but "very few of these solutions reach the necessary scale."
To do so, they say, we need to "explicitly confront the obstacles hindering successful pilot projects and scale these innovations to tackle the full magnitude of the problem."
Among those obstacles: "Capability constraints, such as corruption, insufficient skills, and lack of personnel," the authors write.
And then there's the fact that governments often have "a vast distribution network to reach the poor," and "governments command substantial budgets for social and economic services, making it a powerful player at scale with the capacity to replicate proven innovations."
In the book, the authors look at three ways social enterprises can help solve the world's problems: through for-profit enterprises, governments, and social enterprises.
In the case of the women's self-help groups in India,
A customized collection of grant news from foundations and the federal government from around the Web.
In the world of social enterprises, failure is a cringe-worthy moment nobody wants to talk about. But, social entrepreneurs can benefit from their failures.