| dc.description.abstract | Billions of people in developing and underdeveloped countries currently lack access to basic services and are living in poverty. One of the main reasons is unavailability or limited basic resource (economic, technology, social) in geographical locations where people live. Added with this are the environmental issues such as natural resource depletion, yearlong droughts, climate change that world is currently facing. Combined, these two issues lead to dropping socio-economic development in many rural communities. One way to improve the socio-economic development in rural areas is by the development of social enterprises. Social enterprises developed at the grass root level have significant effects on improving the quality of living of the people in terms of socio-economic standards. There is potential growth possible in social entrepreneurship, however number of social enterprises in developing countries is very low. Lack of social entrepreneurs in developing and underdeveloped countries is seen due to lack of access to funds and knowledge that is required to develop social enterprises anchored in the socio-economic improvement of the communities. Other stakeholders in socio-economic development for people living in poverty are, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) investors and philanthropists. However, they lack access to information required for the development of value propositions that are needed at the ground level to improve quality of life. Both stakeholder (social entrepreneur and investors) involved in social development can partner with each other to boost rural development.
The partnership between social entrepreneur and CSR investors, philanthropist can be useful in rural areas of developing countries to improve their socio-economic level by providing opportunities to each individual. Millions of people living in rural areas with limited resources can be empowered with enterprises developed social entrepreneurs and funded by CSR investors. However, they currently lack access to tools needed to facilitate this partnership. Social entrepreneurs lack a tool to develop value propositions for specific rural areas and have information about the village in quantitative form. CSR investors, philanthropist, on the other hand, require quantitative information along with impact evaluation of the value proposition before investing.
In this thesis, this problem is studied from a system engineering perspective. A framework is developed that can be used by people who aspire to become social entrepreneurs, willing to work for the development of rural communities. Social entrepreneurs also need to take into account the environmental issues that these communities face by managing the problem in terms of sustainable development to have a positive impact on the communities. For CSR investors and philanthropist, an evaluation tool is developed as a part of the framework to compare and analyze different value propositions.
In this thesis, the framework developed is modified and integrated with different constructs that are available in literature currently. The framework proposed in this thesis is developed in generic form, the framework is adaptable, robust and can be used in different social and environmental conditions. The social entrepreneurs and the users of this framework can modify the framework based on their needs. | en_US |
