Constructed Stakeholder Personas: An Educational Tool for Social Entrepreneurs

AbstractSocial entrepreneurship is an increasingly popular model for addressing societal issues in resource-constrained settings. However, like traditional for-profit ventures, social enterprises are dependent on profit generation for success and sustainability. An increasing number of academic and professional institutions are interested in developing curricula to train aspiring social entrepreneurs to build successful ventures. To ensure profitability, aspiring social entrepreneurs must be able to identify their stakeholders and understand the motivations and needs that influence them. However, current methods for collecting and organizing critical data points are often prohibitively expensive in terms of time and money in the early stages of venture development. To empower aspiring social entrepreneurs, programs need tools that take their unique constraints and needs into consideration while delivering positive results. In this article, Constructed Stakeholder Personas (CSPs) are introduced as an adaptation of customer personas, a well-established business development tool, to serve as an alternative to the more cost-prohibitive tools available today. A methodology, which allows educators or experts to create CSPs for use by aspiring social entrepreneurs, is then presented. This dramatically cuts down on the time and cost needed for less experienced entrepreneurs to understand the geographic, demographic, and psychographic details that shape stakeholders’ motivations and needs. Finally, a case study is presented that illustrates a potential use case for CSP

Importance of Interactive Small Group Discussions to Educate Community Health Workers

AbstractCommunity health workers (CHWs) are an effective solution to address the double burden of chronic and infectious diseases in developing countries. Due to limited resources, CHWs seldom receive adequate training. A standardized training regimen with three educational methods was tested with CHWs in Kenya to identify the optimal method. CHWs were divided into three breakout groups each testing a different pedagogy. It was concluded that each method was equally effective. Interactive small group learning methods do not require additional resources and can be easily integrated into CHW training regimens to produce better-prepared health workers

Bringing Community Back to Community Health Worker Studies: Community interactions, data collection, and health information flows

Community Health Workers (CHWs) have the potential to be a great resource in the further growth of the fledging healthcare systems that exist in many developing countries. Through their position as community members, CHWs can interact with other individuals in the areas where they live and work and serve as valuable health resources by providing basic health information and referrals up the healthcare chain. However, few studies have examined CHWs from a community-based perspective. This study analyzes the work and relationships of several CHWs working for the Mashavu mHealth venture in Nyeri, Kenya. Through the use of participant observation and interviews, the workflows of these CHWs were investigated with a specific eye towards interactions between CHWs and their communities and how these interactions affect potential health data collection opportunities. This community-based perspective reveals unique insights into the workflows of the CHWs and how technology might be designed to support them

Responsible Engagement: Building a Culture of Concern

As we scale up engagement with communities around the world, how do we ensure that the foundational engagement principles of responsiveness, respect, and accessibility are never compromised? While community engagement is important and can have a dramatic positive impact, it can also result in unintended negative consequences for all stakeholders, including community members, students, faculty, and staff. At Penn State, we are developing a framework for an Engagement Review Board (ERB) to proactively educate university members about the principles and best practices of engagement, and to work with them to ensure that collaborative projects benefit all stakeholders in spirit and substance. This article summarizes the larger challenge of equitable community engagement and makes the case that there is a need for additional protection such as through an ERB. The various resources and functions that can be provided by an ERB across the life cycle of engagement projects are described. The objective is to stimulate discussion on how we can collectively develop an infrastructure—undergirded by a “culture of concern” rather than a “culture of compliance”—to strengthen and mainstream community engagement without making it more onerous to all stakeholders

Piloting a Healthy Street Food Venture in Kenya: Lessons Learned

AbstractApproximately 2.5 billion people, majority of them in developing countries, consume street foods on a daily basis. High malnourishment rates in these low-resource settings create a need for healthy street food. The successful introduction of healthy street food could ultimately improve communities’ overall health and wellness without constraining people's budgets and eating habits. Packaging locally available ingredients into aspirational foods like pizza improves consumers’ access to micronutrients without disrupting their consumption of indigenous foods. The Zima Pizza venture was piloted in the town of Nyeri, Kenya to pilot this implementation process. This venture introduced a westernized food option into a local restaurant, and the lessons learned from this venture can inform the introduction of healthier street foods. This article outlines the basis for designing healthier meals for a simple street food business, the challenges that arose in the implementation process, and the lessons learned from this social venture

Importance of Interactive Small Group Discussions to Educate Community Health Workers

AbstractCommunity health workers (CHWs) are an effective solution to address the double burden of chronic and infectious diseases in developing countries. Due to limited resources, CHWs seldom receive adequate training. A standardized training regimen with three educational methods was tested with CHWs in Kenya to identify the optimal method. CHWs were divided into three breakout groups each testing a different pedagogy. It was concluded that each method was equally effective. Interactive small group learning methods do not require additional resources and can be easily integrated into CHW training regimens to produce better-prepared health workers

Expanding Engagement Opportunities at a Large Land-Grant Research University: The Engagement Ecosystem Model

How does a public university with over 80,000 students across 24 campuses provide every student with an engaged scholarship experience? This article chronicles the first steps of this ambitious journey to educate a new generation of engaged scholars by building engagement ecosystems: networks of students, faculty, courses, and communities working together on compelling socially relevant projects around a common theme. By incorporating projects from an impact-focused community engagement program into a cross-section of existing classes, universities can expand engagement opportunities from a select few to the vast majority of the students. This article reviews current approaches to scale engagement opportunities before describing the principles and mechanics of the Engagement Ecosystem model. A case study of the pilot implementation of this model is presented with preliminary assessment results (n=1,165), key lessons learned, and future expansion plans

Business Strategies for Agricultural Technology Commercialization

ABSTRACT A wide range of innovative and affordable technologies have emerged to facilitate the creation, expansion, and streamlining of Food Value Chains (FVCs) in developing countries. These technologies target various value chain activities, including agricultural production, processing, storage, marketing, distribution, and consumption. Low-cost greenhouses, solar food dryers, threshers, grinders, storage, and packaging equipment are just a few technologies that have the potential to improve the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers and agricultural workers while making FVCs more efficient and bolstering food security. To successfully disseminate these technologies, entrepreneurs need to develop sound business strategies to get their products to market as well as business models that potential customers can adopt to sustain and profit from the technology. This paper presents a typology of systemic multi-stakeholder business models to assist technology entrepreneurs in commercializing and integrating their agricultural technologies into FVCs

Driven entrepreneurial education in vocational schools

Vocational Education and Training (VET) is offered throughout the world to students of various educational backgrounds and career aspirations in an effort to create a skilled workforce. The structure of VET varies greatly across different fields and countries with high-growth, low-growth, and transitional economies. However, a common critique of many vocational institutions is that they focus on skills training without addressing related business systems. Thus, students may not understand the business strategies related to their field, which stifles job readiness and entrepreneurial potential. To counter this, a more context-driven and integrated entrepreneurial approach is proposed for VET. Benefits, disadvantages, and exemplars of various types of vocational and entrepreneurial programs are evaluated to determine how their strengths might be leveraged. Such integrated entrepreneurial and vocational training would more suitably address context-specific market needs via both practical and transferrable skills, thus helping to reduce unemployment, particularly among youth in sub-Saharan Africa. (DIPF/Orig.