A social enterprise is born but what are the goals?

Ink Foundation launched Craft as a social enterprise with a clear vision in mind; to get farmers 10 time more financial reward for their crafts. Along the journey we are experimenting and learning about financial inclusion, market access, banking the unbanked, the corruption in trade prices and the lack of transparency in logistics. Where to start?

A social enterprise has two goals. A social goal and an economic goal. Along our research path we are step by step defining both of these components in a well balanced strategy.

Our social goal is most important so let's start there. We are focussing on improving market access to disadvantaged farmers and craftspeople. Handcrafts is a major market in developing countries and is expected to growing enormously in the next couple of years. If these disadvantaged people can gain a new channel to market and sell their products they will have an improved change of fighting poverty. The products that we will be looking at are not quite clear yet, next months field mission will bring more clarity to that subject. So we have defined our social goal as following: To create a marketplace that increases market access to the disadvantaged where fair prices are paid. We also want to bring far more transparency into the logistics system.

A social enterprise also has a business or financial goal. We believe that it is essential to keep our entrepreneurial spirit alive in this new project. A healthy profit will keep our organisation progressing and growing and if the pie gets larger we will ultimately be able to help more people with our primary social goal. We still have plenty of research to do to bring the value chain into perspective however the business model is most likely going to be based on a price per transaction model. Per transaction our company will use a very small percentage and use this revenue to grow and reinvest in the company. Thus our business goal can most likely be described as follows; to build the largest online marketplace and designers community for hand crafts in the world. Next step is to quantify what this goal will be.