Registration ›One of the sessions at CIP Forum connected to the Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship track is “Knowledge based entrepreneurship to solve global problems”. This is a topic that very much has influenced my two years at the ICM education as we have been working with our own social entrepreneurship project called The Seaweed Center.
The Seaweed Center project was started in 2008 by the students in the Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship class 2010 and is today a collaborative project between CSE and ICM, the Rylanderska Foundation in Sweden, the Zanzibar Adventure School, Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania, and the local women from the village of Paje in Zanzibar. The goal of the project was from the beginning to create work opportunities and increasing the living standards for the women working with seaweed farming at Zanzibar, by providing them with sustainable means of creating a higher value-added product from seaweed. Therefore, the idea came up of building a seaweed soap factory facility where the women could dry their seaweed in a proper way, and providing them with machines for making soap with seaweed as one ingredient. This way more value can be extracted from the seaweed farming.
As of today the Seaweed Center is built and the women has started to produce and even sell some soaps. The goal is that the center should be self-sustaining within a year, run by the local women with support from the surrounding organization, by selling seaweed soaps to tourists and to local hotels at Zanzibar, and to the Swedish market. We are still in the very long process of registering a social business at Zanzibar, but hopefully we will soon run the first social business on the island. The center is also developing into a knowledge center where the local people of Paje could go to English classes and get access to Internet, and other businesses are planned to be started in relation to the center, such as seaweed center tours for tourists and sales of local made clothes.
Through the Seaweed Center we are also hoping that will will increase the entrepreneurial spirit of the people in Paje and that more businesses will be started as a positive effect. In a few years time we are also aiming at spreading the concept to other villages at Zanzibar to help more people increasing their living standard through entrepreneurship. Even though we don’t solve a huge global problem we are doing something for some people that hopefully will have large impact on the society in Paje.
This is just one example of how social entrepreneurship could be made. Please use this blog to share your experiences, and to highlight interesting entrepreneurship initiatives that are contributing to solving global problems.
Annika Nyberg, Class of ICM 11, Blog Coordinator