Oxfam Vietnam recently launched a new project to support social enterprises in Vietnam to promote the development of enterprises whose activities have a positive impact on community and social development and contribute to poverty reduction. This project is part of the social impacting investment programme of Oxfam currently being implemented in Nigeria, Uganda and Vietnam with a total investment estimated at € 8 million.
Ms Nguyen Le Hoa, Acting Director of Oxfam in Vietnam, assessed that social enterprises had an important contribution in promoting sustainable economic development in many countries around the world. In Vietnam, despite being new type of business, social enterprises are demonstrating their role in creating positive social impact, helping disadvantaged groups in society. However, they are facing many challenges in developing their role, including difficulties in accessing capital, building effective business models and market access.
Through the social impacting investment program, Oxfam's first interventions will aim to support social enterprise in terms of funding in the form of preferential loans and unsecured loans, and raise capacity to expand business, increase operational efficiency, enhance business capacity and bring social impact to a bigger scale in order to enhance access to social investment capital.
The programme directly supports small and medium-sized businesses that are directly creating a positive impact for small-scale farming producers, women and youth. The social selected enterprises are those in need of capital (including debt and equity) to develop businesses for the purpose of enhancing the social impact and maintain sustainable development, but having insufficient access to conventional loans of commercial banks or may not qualify for capital calls.
In the period 2014-2015, the first intervention of the programme will support raising capacity for the social enterprises with the aim of helping these units complete their business plans and meet the conditions for access to loans from the program as well as from other investors.
In this phase, the program is expected to provide orientation courses for 15 social enterprises, 10 consulting packs for business development planning and cash funding for a number of small businesses committed to cost-sharing to support enterprises implement capacity building programs and increasing access to investment resources.
Social impacting investment programme of Oxfam will provide loans to businesses to meet the investment requirements with loans from €10,000 to €1.5 million.
In Vietnam, the Centre for Social Initiatives Promotion (CSIP) will be one of the partners in collaboration with Oxfam to implement activities of programme to support building capacity for social enterprises.
In the framework of the social impacting investment programme, Oxfam will continue to expand partnerships with organisations related to social enterprise development and the social impacting investment sector to connect and share resources. At the same time Oxfam will also coordinate with these organizations to implement operation to raise community awareness about the social impacting investment to promote the development of social enterprises with the goal of bringing more positive impact on the community, especially small farmers, women and youth.
Quynh Anh
Vietnamese
