UnLtd India and Acumen Fund

UnLtd India and Acumen Fund – Day 6 (Tuesday August 8th)

Today our social entrepreneurship finally met with UnLtd India and Acumen Fund. It was very exciting to meet both organizations because they are the poster children of social entrepreneurship. UnLtd India functions as an incubator and acts as a jump start for individuals that have an idea, want to bring the idea from concept to an actual realization, and with the eventual end goal for social impact. UnLtd India assist these social entrepreneurs in accelerating the process of the project, the development of management and leadership skills, and the preparation to further scale-up these social entrepreneur projects once success has been generated through social impact or profit. UnLtd India has four main programs to help social entrepreneurs throughout the process which include incubation support, bootcamp, Bombay Hub, and Social Mashup. UnLtd India has found success through the successful ventures of several projects that have come to fruition such as mail courier service run by the hearing impaired. Although since many of the project have been around for about four years, it’s hard to point out how large the success has been. Overall, UnLtd India process is only the beginning of future things to come and the concept of social entrepreneurship is still new and much research needs to be done.
It was eventually realized how research, collecting and measuring data, and how the public health field is essential in social entrepreneurship when the Acumen Fund presented. Acumen Fund provides loans to social entrepreneurship projects with the goal that it will yield financial results and social impact. Acumen Fund has 36 projects all over the world ranging in five portfolios which are water, health, housing, energy, and agriculture. When Acumen Fund spoke about their Life Hospitals, hospitals that provide maternal care for low-income women, and explained that they have no data to measure the social entrepreneurship success of the program, we were left in shocked. What I have noticed with various social entrepreneurship ventures is that they have a business framework, but at times fail to connect the importance of understanding the population and their issues and this is where I see the important role of public health and research, particularly when dealing with health programs.
Overall, because social entrepreneurship is still a new concept, research is vital, and it will take years of trial and error to understand the best methods for social entrepreneurship projects to succeed and to continue in creating the necessary social impact.