African countries should invest time and resources in creating an environment conducive to social innovation given that it’s an important source of long-term growth, both in traditional and high-growth, high-value added sectors. ‘Social innovation can provide crucial contributions to higher productivity and competitiveness and confront social challenges,’ said Dr Thomas Munthali, the African Capacity Building Foundation’s (ACBF) Director of Knowledge, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Speaking at a High Level Panel discussion on 'Social Innovation and Investment' held on Friday at The Space in Harare, Zimbabwe, Dr Munthali said that Investment in social innovation was important as it could help to solve Africa’s pressing and complex social demands and societal challenges, contribute to the modernization of public services, bring growth and social change. ‘the main advantage of social innovation is that it responds to specific “local” conditions. In the process, this improves welfare and access to business opportunities, allows countries to catch up with the world on the technological frontier and build-up niche competencies in sectors of their comparative advantage.”
However, there are capacity challenges to social innovation on the continent. “Among the capacity challenges facing Africa are the development of an innovation mind-set and environment, the capacity to design and coordinate policies supporting social innovation policies, to implement the policies and strategies related to social innovations, to strengthen and use technologies for social innovation, the capacity for efficient sharing of best practices and testing of innovative policies as well as the scaling up of the most successful measures and community ownership. There is also need to ensure that sufficient skilled persons are available for dissemination and peer-learning around social innovation on the continent,” added Dr Munthali.
He also called for businesses and philanthropy institutions to re-think their investment models to focus more on social innovation. Businesses can use corporate social innovation to operate, affect changes and achieve social and environmental value creation alongside financial profit. They could achieve this by opening up new markets for growth and improving the standard of living of marginalized populations.
Philanthropy institutions can catalyze and support social innovations by identifying and supporting innovation-oriented community-based organizations, and contributing to the building of local capacities to actualize and broaden the potential around innovative initiatives.
“Venture philanthropy is also very important when it comes to promoting start-up, growth, and risk-taking social ventures. It plays an important role in diversifying capital markets for non-profits and social purpose organizations. This field is growing,” said Dr Munthali.
He concluded by saying that ACBF had encouraged social innovation through its support to entities like the African Association of Universities (AAU) that have developed a series of programs that have aided in the development of leaders, collection of research and support of faculty improvements in addition to providing platforms for scaling up ideas that work through mentoring and peer-learning.
Social innovation refers to initiatives, products or processes that profoundly change the beliefs, behaviors, cultures, power dynamics, basic routines and/or access to resources of any social system in the directions of greater equity, productivity and resilience.
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