Guwahati — A group of university students in northeast India spent time learning the basics of social entrepreneurship from one of the leading social audit authorities in India.
Honorary director of Chennai based Centre for Social Initiative and Management Dr Latha Suresh on August 24 addressed some 140 students and faculty of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Assam Don Bosco University, Azara campus.
Established 15 years ago CSIM is the first to start social entrepreneurship in India and also the first to provide modules of the same for higher education.
Explaining the concept of social audit Dr Suresh says, “we know there is financial audit to see how money is spent for the intended purpose or not. So also, there is social audit to evaluate how much impact or social transformation has taken place in the community as a result of all the developmental initiatives.”
Today there are more than 3.4 million registered non governmental organizations (NGO) operating in India.
Citing the successful polio eradication program in India Dr Suresh insists that “for any social issue is to be addressed successfully, we need organizations working on a massive scale to solve the problem.”
Social entrepreneurship is the attempt to draw upon business techniques to find solutions to social problems. This concept may be applied to a variety of organizations with different sizes, aims, and beliefs.
Social entrepreneur is a socially motivated person with business mind – who evolves into a business model and work for social change through a process of social audit.
Assistant professor of Social Work Dr Jacob Lukose shared some salient findings of a social audit survey of 1,200 young people from 20 colleges in Guwahati, where he found that 80 per cent of the girls wanted a state government job while only 8 per cent of boys looked for entrepreneurship opportunities.
Dr Suresh also visited the permanent campus of Assam Don Bosco University at Tapesia in Sonapur area of Guwahati and interacted with some of the 42 villages with whom university is engaged for joint development activities since last four years.