The Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Women's Empowerment: Case of Cöp(m)adam

Introduction

During the last decades, social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development of countries have come to the top of agendas across the world. In this respect, women’s empowerment and gender equality is a sine qua non for sustainable development. Also as a human rights issue, women’s empowerment is accepted both as a precondition for and indicator of sustainable development (Warth & Koparanova, 2012). Women both are affected by the implications of development and contribute to sustainable development. Thus, women’s empowerment requires an enabling and supportive environment where all obstacles are removed and women are more involved in economic, political, and social spheres of life. In fact, lack of women’s empowerment leads to unfair conditions for women, in turn, prevents the whole society to realize its full potential. However, women across the World, still face challenges to access critical resources to gain economic, psychological and political empowerment. Although, governments, non-governmental organizations, women associations, etc. take various attempts, there are still major difficulties in eliminating gender inequality and empowering women in the social, economic, and political spheres.

In such a context, social entrepreneurs are emerging as significant actors generating solutions for such unmet problems. As an increasingly growing area of interest, social entrepreneurship is accepted as catalyze of social transformation through alleviating social problems such as poverty, education, environmental pollution (Alvord et al., 2004). By using innovative business approaches and combining resources creatively, social entrepreneurs address long-lasting problems and may alter existing social structures. In this respect, social entrepreneurship is particularly important for developing countries to fight against various problems considering their limited budgets and structural inadequacies. Yet, comparing to developed country contexts (e.g. United-States, UK) little is known about the social entrepreneurial activities in emerging and developing economies.

From this point of view, the purpose of this chapter is to add to the emerging literature on social entrepreneurship by focusing on a developing country, Turkey, in which social entrepreneurship has started to develop but still remains an understudied context. Chapter aims to reveal how social entrepreneurship generates a solution for a long lasting problem of the country, women empowerment. As a matter of fact, in developing countries, gender inequality is highly widespread and gender-based discrimination is apparent. Turkey has also some significant problems in gender equality and women empowerment (Arat, 2010; Dedeoğlu, 2012). Government’s NGOs’, and businesses’ attempts may fall short to reach every corner and address all women’s needs. In this vein, this chapter provides a deeper understanding of how social entrepreneurship can support women’s empowerment based on the case of Çöp(m)adam which provides income for local women who are often ignored.

After the introduction, the chapter continues with a brief explanation on women’s empowerment concept. Following that, based on the related literature, the role of social entrepreneurship in creating solutions to social problems is discussed. Accordingly, the case of Çöp(m)adam is presented. First, in order to reveal the innovative business approach, its business model is explained. Then, based on the interview data, which is gathered from primary and secondary data sources, the role of Çöp(m)adam in supporting women’s economic and psychological empowerment is revealed.