Supporting sustainable, equitable growth in sub-Saharan Africa: a conceptual model for enabling social enterprise governance

This chapter explores how a new conceptual social enterprise business model might contribute to our understanding of the dynamics involved in creating sustainable and inclusive societies in developing economies, or base-of-pyramid in sub-Sahara Africa. First, we provide a narrative systematic review of the current landscape regarding social enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa. From our critical review we identify a divergent set of findings from which four main themes emerged that constrained the development of social enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa: (a) environmental factors; (b) the role of institutions; (c) the informal economy; and, most significantly, (c) access to finance. Second, from these findings we propose a new social enterprise business model that provides an effective conduit between stakeholders in emerging economies as well as local and international decision makers, including businesses.