Africa is like a second home to Dr Diane Holt.
She was brought up in the West Midlands where her father had a car repair business and her mother ran a shop. This early understanding and experience of local enterprise is something which has stayed with her throughout her academic career and which she is now using in a major project in the 19 countries of Southern and Eastern Africa.
Diane, a lecturer at Queen’s Management School, has been travelling to Africa since she was a student at Stirling University in 1991. Now she has launched an imaginative and hugely ambitious research programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council First Grants Scheme, which she calls the ‘Trickle Out Africa Project.’ It aims to identify examples of social and environmental enterprises in the region and to explore and evaluate the role that these enterprises may play as a way of spreading social, environmental and economic benefits from within local communities.
It was from studying a group of small ‘green’ businesses in the United States that she developed an interest in the intersection between the environmental and social objectives of business. She read that social and environmental enterprises are considered the key to sustainable development in Africa, underlined by the words of the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that ‘trade, not aid, is the long-term route out of poverty.’
She says, ‘Our research proposal was unique. One of the biggest problems in Africa is that the usual way of conducting academic research is parachuting in, collecting data and then you go again, leaving nothing behind. I thought we could make more of a contribution than that so I came up with the idea"Our goal is to showcase transformative, truly innovative business models." of a directory.’
She describes this as being like ‘a big online telephone book. The ambition is that if you want a partner in solar power technology in, say, Kenya, you can click and find one. In addition, many of the enterprises we’re dealing with don’t have a web presence of their own so this is a way of providing them with one.’
The directory will contain examples of social or environmental enterprises that produce, retail, manufacture or offer services, along with donor agencies, voluntary associations and assurance schemes that support them.
One problem she has encountered is – what constitutes a social enterprise? ‘That’s a big issue because they self-designate. The nature of these enterprises is radically different and so what we might think of as a social enterprise here – where, for example, a certain percentage of profit is reinvested – those things don’t work so well in Africa. Some of the enterprises aren’t even registered, they’re not part of the formal economy, they don’t pay tax.’
She explains, ‘There is a gaping hole in knowledge in this area. Our goal is to showcase the transformative, home-grown, truly innovative business models that form the bedrock of the region.
‘The directory is making an impact already. It’s early days yet but it’s already becoming a very valuable resource for those who need it. It has the potential to become very powerful. It’s growing constantly. The website and the data collection instruments are in five languages and that will increase too, and through individual case studies, we’ll come up with a more rigorous evidence-led framework for the future.
‘We hope that what we come up with will influence policymakers and also shape how social and “environmental enterprise” is considered by those of us in the west looking at Africa. We’re already making our mark. If you Google the words “environmental enterprise” and “Africa”, you’ll see that we’re all over the internet.’
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