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Civil society organisations (CSOs) in Zambia are beginning to consider incorporating social enterprise initiatives as a way ensure long-term sustainability. A social enterprise is an organisation that is directly involved in the sale of goods and services to a market, but that also has specific social objectives that serve as its primary purpose. Profits made by the social enterprise are mostly used to fund social programmes. With donor funds dwindling, CSOs’ ability to continue their core business is hampered and they may seek alternative funding mechanisms like a social enterprise in order to continue reaching their mission.
Despite social enterprise being viewed as something non-traditional and complex, Chikanta Community Schools Development Project (CCSDP), an organisation that has been supported by ZGF to advocate for improved quality of education in community schools in Choma has a different story to tell. CCSDP shared their experience in establishing their social enterprise initiative. After years of struggling with just an idea of delivering a product, CCSDP finally set up their social enterprise business with a desire to drive social impact that was self-sustainable and focused on social objectives.
CCSDP says the dwindling, unstable and unpredictable resources from external sources, prompted them to establish an enterprise to grow, process and extract oil from sunflower and groundnuts grown locally in southern province. This would not only allow them to increase their resource base and reduce over dependence on external funding but also increase the value addition opportunities for local smallholder women farmers.
“Just like many other grass-root organisations, we have not achieved much when it comes to the implementation of our projects due to limited financial capacity. Thus, we decided to take the social enterprise root so as to supplement our funds,” CCSDP said.
CCSDP says they harbored the idea of establishing a social enterprise business for a long time as they were clueless of how they would go about it. However, through the capacity building trainings by ZGF, they began to see that it was really feasible for them to develop new activities tailored towards income generation that enhanced and not deviated from their mission.
“The capacity development trainings by ZGF were just an eye opener which gave us courage to broaden our horizon and identify gaps within our organisation. The Resource Mobilisation training which emphasised seeking alternative funding sources and just tapping into local resources really helped us to think outside the box. Thus, we decided to explore the idea of manufacturing cooking oil from sunflower and groundnuts as they are readily available in our province. Again, ZGF helped us with our strategic plan which made us realise that we needed to do things a little differently to sustainably support our organisational activities in the face of dwindling external support,” explained CCSDP.