Entrepreneurship dominates the social change discussion these days. It is understood differently across stakeholders and partners who make up the social change landscape. A possible fresh approach could be to look at the community itself in that framework.
Right-based organisations have often struggled and succeeded in positioning community as the key change maker and linked awareness about the notion of rights or right holder as a key investment in larger change process that is deep and sustainable.
When you spend time with the community witnessing how people rally around demands of entitlements and rights, it becomes clear how the rights-based framework, when seen as an entrepreneurship model, works on leveraging incremental changes to create chain reaction that unlocks public investments and creates enabling space for large-scale changes.
For instance, when a community comes together to get a school building, toilets, teachers etc the narrative is two fold. First, the demand framework looks at building awareness, solidarity and access points. Second, linking it to a change narrative that community builds to plot its investment case and rally the community around a bunch of essential schemes.
In other words, while one looks at how schemes have been taken up by communities and converted into social processes, we also need to highlight how individual entitlements have been linked to create a much wider narrative for a policy framework that is focused on public investment in key services.
Communities have been working as entrepreneurs using smaller access and assets to demand and unlock much bigger piece of schemes and hence public investments. We often miss out on highlighting this dynamics and hence lend space to shallow analysis of how entitlement schemes are not optimal.
There is a need to look at the community as an entrepreneur on three counts: the creation on enabling environment around schemes to turn them into social mobilisation processes; harnessing interconnected schemes while strengthening demand and supply linkage; making a case for a larger framework for development based on rights and entitlements.
