CEDPA Presents Social Enterprise at Sustainability Workshop in South Africa

Mar. 21, 2005—A four-day workshop sponsored by the Women's Legal Rights Initiative's Southern Africa office on "Sustainability for Non-Governmental Organizations in Southern Africa" was held in Benoni, South Africa on February 22-25, 2005.

This regional capacity building workshop was designed to provide representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with tools to:

• assist their organizations in creating options for more sustainability;
• reduce their dependence on donors;
• develop a peer mentoring relationship to provide the participants with support over the year following the workshop; and
• seek to encourage the participants to mentor lesser-developed, community-based organizations in their regions.

CEDPA is a partner in the Women's Legal Rights (WLR) Initiative, a project of the USAID Office of Women in Development, led by the Chemonics Consortium. WLR coordinates with international donors and local stakeholders to provide strategies to identify constraints, discern gaps and document best practices in women's legal rights.

Susan Bazilli provided a presentation for CEDPA at the workshop on “social enterprise,” referring to ways to pursue social change through earned income or business activities, but not necessarily for generating revenue. The session served as an introduction to various aspects of sustainability, social enterprise, earned income strategies and social entrepreneurship. A brief outline on the history of the social enterprise movement was also provided to the participants to situate them within the global context.

The workshop was facilitated by REDI, a management consulting firm from Swaziland, who trained the participants on fiscal management, mentoring, organizational development, diversity and general capacity building. Also included were a mentoring session and presentation of participants' action plans to donors.

One participant, Nadia Belete from the Forum for African Women Educationalists in Namibia (FAWENA), built upon the social enterprise ideas she learned in the workshop for her action plan. She proposed that FAWENA combine earned income strategies with support for the women and girls of the organization to make and sell indigenous handicrafts to create a revenue stream for the group, as well as for the individual constituents.

As follow up to the workshop, CEDPA/South Africa hopes to develop a workshop targeting the needs of women's NGOs to learn more about social enterprise.

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