Dubai TV executive does her bit for social enterprise

TV executive's Dubai-based social enterprise C3 helps social entrepreneurs find mentors to get a business idea off the ground.

Medea Nocentini is using her business skills to help fledgling social enterprises on a pro bono basis. Jeffrey Biteng / The National

While studying for her MBA in 2005 in New York, the Italian native Medea Nocentini took a set of classes in social entrepreneurship.

The idea of using business strategies to solve social problems and ploughing profits back into the business or community rather than giving them to shareholders was something that resonated with her.

“It was a new model and the more I read about it the more it made sense,” she says.

Three years ago, Ms Nocentini, who is vice president for corporate development at the pay TV network OSN in Dubai, started using her business skills to help fledgling social enterprises on a pro bono basis.

Intrigued, her friends in the corporate world also wanted to help. So she started looking for more social entrepreneurs and in December 2011 she hosted the first speed consulting event with a group of professional friends, friends of friends and 10 social enterprises.

From there, the initiative has sprouted into a social enterprise in its own right called Consult and Coach for a Cause — or C3.

C3 now regularly hosts day-long workshops to raise awareness about what social enterprises are, to encourage potential social entrepreneurs to start a business, and to recruit coaches and professional experts.

“We realised social enterprise was not yet a concept that was as familiar in the UAE as in other parts of the world so we started running workshops to raise awareness,” Ms Nocentini says.

The concept of social enterprise has been kicking around for decades but became more widely known after the Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the concept of microcredit. Since then, it’s become increasingly trendy, with Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon founding their own organisations. His is water.org.

The number of social businesses is also expected to grow in coming years as entrepreneurs identify profit-making opportunities in areas in which the public sector, non- governmental organisations and for-profit corporations have failed. Such areas include sanitation, water, food, climate and waste.

Entrepreneurs in the UAE are particularly well placed to create such businesses, according to Soushiant Zanganehpour, a strategy and special projects consultant at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford university.

Whereas social entrepreneurs in the UK focus on the problems of the “privileged” (such as issues related to ageing societies), those in the Middle East can tackle very basic issues such as lack of access to education, to health care, to bank accounts, to insurance.

“There are very big market-based problems that [need solutions] — that’s the opportunity in the Middle East,” Mr Zanganehpour says. “You can build businesses that solve problems and create irreversible change for people and make a livelihood out of it.”

Investors are also increasingly catching on, creating funds that focus on “impact investing”. There are now about 250 such funds worldwide and that market is currently worth about US$25 billion, according to the Global Impact Investing Network.

At a C3 workshop in Dubai last month, about 50 would-be entrepreneurs and volunteers gave up their Saturday to learn more.

Entrepreneurs discovered they can apply to join one of C3’s accelerator programmes, each of which lasts about a year. They are assigned a coach to help them navigate the hurdles of whatever stage they are at in building their businesses: idea, start-up or growth stage. They can also meet specialists in, say, branding or financial modelling as needed.

Volunteers, many of whom have coaching qualifications, either agree to work as long-term mentors or to provide ad hoc advice.

Building a social enterprise is a roller-coaster ride and it helps to know there are others out there who can help, Ms Nocentini says.

Shereen Saif quit her full-time PR job in June to turn her fledgling idea for a social business related to performance arts into reality.

Her two main takeaways from the workshop are that there is an established process to go through in setting up a social business and that there is a community of like-minded people.

“You have a framework,” she explains. “When you are on your own the first thing you think about is, how do you set up? But there is a lot more that goes before that: talking, crystallising your idea, making it feasible from a business point of view. Now I know this is my roadmap: I speak to one of the team at C3, go through a process and I fine- tune what it really is I want to do. It can also be a very lonely and anxious couple of months or years so I feel a lot more reassured that there is a support system.”

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