[DEBATE] : (Fwd) WB reeducation camp for SA student 'social entrepreneurs'

[Patrick Bond]

NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON STUDENT SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Hosted by Department of Science and Technology, World Bank
Institute and Meraka Institute

DAY ONE
6 March 2008
8h30-9h00 Arrival and Registration

SESSION 1: PROJECT VISION AND FRAMEWORK

9h00 Welcome: Department of Science and Technology
DST Socio Economic Partnerships (Speaker TBC)

9h20 Welcome & Overview of Student Social Entrepreneurship
Bob Hawkins, World Bank Institute

9h30 Workshop objectives
Kim Tucker, Meraka Institute

9h40 Community Project Site Visits
Dr Martina Jordaan, University of Pretoria

9h50 Tea and Coffee Break

SESSION 2: COMMUNITY SITE VISITS

10h00- 13h30 Community project site visits with Partner Institutes
Site visits facilitated by University of Pretoria

13h30- 15h00 Lunch

BREAKAWAY SESSION: FOSTERING SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

15h00-16h00 Group discussions: observations, insights and inspirational 
factors

16h00 Reportback and Prioritisation
Kim Tucker, Meraka Institute

16h45 Closing remarks
Bob Hawkins, World Bank Institute

17h00 Free Time and Zen activity

WORKSHOP DINNER

18h30 Zen Garden Table Setting

19h00 Dinner
Presentation: South African Inspirational Speaker (TBC)
SSE Wiki content awards

21h00 End of Day One


NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON STUDENT SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Hosted by Department of Science and Technology, World Bank
Institute and Meraka Institute

DAY TWO
7 March 2008

SESSION 1: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

8h00- 8h30 Arrival

8h30 Summary of Day 1 proceedings and overview of Day 2 activities
Bob Hawkins, World Bank Institute

8h35 Circle of Courage – Overview
Win Win Institute

9h00 Breakaway groups: bringing social entrepreneurship to life

9h45 Tea and Coffee Break

SESSION 2: OPPORTUNTIES FOR COLLABORATION

10h00-11h30 Group activity: Provocative Propositions and Creative 
Expressions (preparation)
Kim Tucker, Meraka Institute

11h30-12h00 Presentations: Creative expressions (5 min per team)

12h00-12h45 Presentation on National Collaborative Project on SSE - 
current status
Bob Hawkins, World Bank Institute

12h45-13h30 Open discussion on Social Entrepreneurship, National 
Collaborative Project and Grassroots innovation in South Africa

13h30 Lunch

SESSION 3: 100 DAY CHALLENGE FOR THE SSE NETWORK

14h30 SSE 100 Day Challenge
Identification of five key projects, identification of champions & team 
leaders and core project teams to promote social entrepreneurship at 
tertiary institutes
Win Win Institute

15h30 Closing remarks and workshop evaluation
Bob Hawkins, World Bank Institute

16h00 Workshop close and delegates depart

National Workshop on Student Social Entrepreneurship

1 BACKGROUND TO THE NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON STUDENT SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The World Bank Institute and the Meraka Institute are engaged in a 
collaborative partnership to create a network of South African 
universities around the theme of community outreach and social 
entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurs are those champions of society 
who apply their passion and energies to uplift their communities. The 
initiative emerged from the Knowledge for Africa’s Development 
Conference in which participants stressed the following as key 
priorities for knowledge economy development in Africa:

The need for a broader role for universities in national development
Key role of education – particularly real world experiences, 
entrepreneurship, problem solving, technical literacy and teamwork.
Role of Youth – importance to engage young people in identifying and 
solving national development challenges.
Community innovations – the important role that poor urban and rural 
communities must play in identifying and fostering innovations for 
development.

The network that is being formed responds to these priorities and 
attempts to leverage the energy, creativity, and technological prowess 
of young people to partner with communities to create new initiatives 
for community development as well as support transparency and 
identification of bottlenecks for service delivery in these communities. 
The network also hopes to directly address the problem of youth 
unemployment by imparting the skills to create new organizations. The 
initiative will aspire to engender a “can do” attitude in communities to 
identify challenges and apply innovative solutions to addressing them.

The project aims to make an impact four fold by the:
creation or adaptation of open source material in a WIKI that can be 
utilized in a student community either regionally or nationally;
creation of a network of student social entrepreneurs locally and 
internationally that will communicate, and share learning and 
experiences online;
use innovative information technology for capturing data in communities 
that will give baseline data and indicate overall progress on service 
delivery; and
create a portal to enable students to present their projects using 
multimedia online, and assess projects by peer review and evaluate them 
online.

Thus far a number of planning and networking meetings have taken 
involving mainly Gauteng institutions. Moreover, a draft wiki has been 
developed on Wikiversity to facilitate collaboration. The tertiary 
network however would now like to expand to institutions beyond the 
Gauteng area and are planning a national workshop in March 2008.


2 OBJECTIVES OF THE WORKSHOP

The workshop is aimed at bringing key champions from Higher Education 
Institutes, Community and Non governmental organisations, Social 
entrepreneurs, Corporate Social Responsibility Program managers in the 
Private sector, Donor funders, Government departments and local 
municipalities engaged in social entrepreneurship / community engagement 
or service learning and will span over two days.

The event will focus on fostering closer interaction amongst university 
participants, corporate social responsibility representatives from the 
private sector, non governmental agencies, government departments and 
local government. The programme will include plenary sessions, breakaway 
sessions amongst smaller teams, and site visits to community engagement 
projects.


3 EXPECTED OUTCOMES OF THE WORKSHOP

The key outcome of the workshop is to create a network of enthusiastic 
education practitioners in Student Social Entrepreneurship and offer a 
support system for these individuals who will continue their discussions 
and collaborative work through the SSE Wiki and the South African 
Student Social Entrepreneurship Exchange Network discussion group.

The second outcome will be to create a common framework for students to 
collaborate on social entrepreneurial activities in disadvantaged 
communities. The Collaborative project activity will develop and 
implement a semester long (15 week) university on-line project for 
university students (and potentially out-of-school youth) to engage with 
communities to identify innovative solutions to community challenges. 
The initiative will consist of four phases.

Project inception
Project proposal development
Prototype implementation
Final Business Plan submission

The collaboration will be very hands on with extensive interaction with 
the community. As a final output to the activity, students will 
collaborate to develop a business plan for a socially-oriented 
organization. The activity will also leverage technology to facilitate 
communications, information exchange and data collection throughout the 
15 week activity with use of blogs, on-line voting applications, 
uploading of cell phone data, etc.

The activity will develop much needed skills among young people to 
identify community challenges and learn how socially-oriented 
organizations are started and sustained.

The third outcome is the development of a collaborative website to 
support the national collaborative project where students will be guided 
through the process of using the interactive tool developed during the 
course of the year. Essentially a database will be created for common 
project activities to be documented and shared within the broader SSE 
community. Students will also be guided to use the Collaborative website 
to document and evaluate their projects.

The fourth outcome will be the initiation of a pilot project initially 
driven in Gauteng based institutions to test the collaborative project 
idea within a smaller community before launching amongst all the 
Southern African universities. This will then serve as a prototype for 
other activities to be implemented nationally across a wider network of 
institutions.


For more information please contact:
Thiru Naidoo-Swettenham
World Bank Institute
Phone: (27) 12 431-3131
Fax: (27) 12 431-3134
email: tnswettenham at worldbank.org
Mailing Address: PO Box 12629, Hatfield, Pretoria, South Africa, 0028
Physical Address: 1st Floor, Pro Equity Court Building, 1250 Pretorius 
St. Hatfield