Social Entrepreneurs are putting an end to NGOs.

While NGOs have operated in Africa for a long time, there is a new paradigm in the industry. The social entrepreneurship sector, even though nascent, is being embraced by many of the continent’s leaders to help fight some of the most debilitating conditions in the continent. The social entrepreneurship sector spans a large array of sectors, and it is hard to think of any sector that will not be disrupted by this mode of solving the continent’s most pressing problems.

At the South Africa based African Leadership Academy, the school’s founders, Fred Swaniker, Chris Bradford, and Acha Leke, envision a school that is going to create the next generation of African leaders. The school admits some of the most gifted students from Africa and around the world. Acceptance rates in the school are less than 5 percent. The school relies on a large number of donors, who help educate the students. The most needy students are awarded full scholarships, while those who can afford to pay cough up rates that they will be comfortable with. The school’s vision is to produce the next generation of African
leaders that will push the curve in entrepreneurship, leadership, and academics. The school was started in 2008, but has already had some impressive achievements. Its foremost goal is that it has helped Africa’s most gifted students to interact with each other, and learn from each other. One of its former students, William Kamkwamba, now a senior at Dartmouth College, helped build a wind turbine in his home village in Malawi, before matriculating to ALA. He hopes that he will be able to invest in the renewable energy sector in Africa, which he sees as having a lot of potential. Still, many other students have been admitted to world leading colleges and are set on doing amazing things in their careers.

In Ghana, Patrick Awuah helped found Ashesi University, which he also hopes will train the next generation of leaders in the continent. Awuah left Ghana as a teenager, went to enroll in Swarthmore College, and worked for Microsoft for a number of years. Through his colleagues at Microsoft, and from friends and family, he helped fundraise nearly half a million dollars to start the liberal Arts College in Accra, Ghana. He hopes that the school will inculcate the same liberal Arts education that he gained at Swarthmore, rather than the rote learning which he feels is so prevalent in his country and around the continent. The students pay fees that they can afford, and a number of students are on full scholarships.

While these two examples are in the education sector, they nonetheless show the potential for social entrepreneurship in Africa, and around the world. What is needed is a means to ensure that the goals that were set at the beginning are achieved. This could be by the literacy rates achieved, successful businesses founded, number of connected taps to piped water, families that have been lifted from poverty and other such metrics. These metrics were not usually deployed in the traditional NGO sector, which is why many still believe that the billions of dollars poured into the continent in form of aid has almost been akin to throwing money into a bottomless pit. What’s more, social entrepreneurship can achieve an exit point; while NGOs by their very nature, could perpetuate a problem to ensure their survival.