Doing business, doing good?

What contribution can business make to sustainable development?

“Doing business, doing good?” The participants in the workshop offered by research associates Andrea Barth and Kathleen Jacobs from the Department of Economics as part of this year’s Conference of Youth (COY13) in Bonn on November 3 learned how “social entrepreneurship” promotes sustainable development.

COY is an official event of YOUNGO, the youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which offered an extensive program for young people from November 2 to 4, 2017 in the run-up to the currently ongoing 23rd UN Climate Change Conference (COP23). “Numerous nations from all over the world have traveled to COY,” Barth reports enthusiastically, “and they all have one mission: to stop climate change.” COY consists of 225 individual program contributions on the topic of climate justice, in which nearly 1,300 climate activists as well as interested students from 120 countries are taking part. NGOs as well as sustainability-oriented institutions and individual actors offered a wide range of workshop contributions for COY.

In the workshop “Doing Business, doing Good?  – The Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Promoting Sustainable Development,” the participants from Tanzania, Vietnam, China, France, and Germany worked under the guidance of Barth and Jacobs on the importance of business for society. “It is important to us that young people understand the influence social entrepreneurship has on society and the potential behind it,” says Jacobs, who also emphasizes the differences among social enterprises: “It is important to examine social entrepreneurship critically as well.” Using artistic methods, expert input, and a case study, the young people developed the business model of a social enterprise in the field of educational equity. Particularly pleasing was the international composition of the participants and the resulting diversity of innovative proposed solutions for the case study, as well as the strong interest in alternative approaches to business, as also taught in degree programs at Alanus University.