Community engagement in social entrepreneurship: evidence from Kenya

Over the last decade, the value of social enterprises to economies and societies has been increasingly recognised by policymakers and scholars. Driven by a social cause, social enterprises carry out entrepreneurial activities to help address unmet social needs or intractable issues. However, in order for this to work, social enterprises and local communities need to have a strong and close relationship with each other, normally through a high level of engagement. While the literature has well-documented the critical roles local communities play in the success of social enterprises, our understanding of how social enterprises (proactively) engage local communities is limited. Many social entrepreneurs assume that local communities are keen, or at least do not object, to being engaged by social enterprises, which has been proven not to be the case. Consequently, this study investigates the ways in which local communities are engaged during a social enterprise’s creation and development process. A qualitative, single-case study approach was adopted to examine a British social enterprise that supports disadvantaged local children in Kenya via its adventure tour operating business. The fieldwork was undertaken in Kenya over two phases. Data were gathered from 63 semi-structured interviews with the social entrepreneur, the managers and employees of the social enterprise, and key stakeholders of the local communities. Participant observation and document analysis were also used to help triangulate and make sense of the interviews. The findings indicated that community engagement took place throughout the process of the social enterprise’s creation and development, including the ‘conception’, ‘development’, and ‘scaling-up’ stages. At each stage, the purpose of engaging the local communities, the main actors from both the social enterprise and the local community sides, and the ‘tactics’ that facilitated engagement, were revealed. Interestingly, at different stages of the social enterprise creation and development, different members of the social enterprise utilised a selection of ‘tactics’, termed ‘engagement elements’, in distinctive ways to engage various members of the local community. This led to the development of the first empirical framework of community engagement in social entrepreneurship. This framework may provide food for thought for social entrepreneurs/enterprises who seek to engage local communities where the members have a predisposition to distrust external individuals and/or organisations. The findings may also be relevant to social entrepreneurs/enterprises with a dominant Western culture or appearance seeking to operate in Kenya or other East African countries.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Dou, Na

Contributors dc:contributor

• Handley, Karen
• Koning, Juliette

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/4vfd-p011

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:4ad57c90-d6c5-4d69-9c09-f8c3f6109cc5:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1