On July 7th, Socential attended the ECOSOC Innovation Fair, presenting at a booth shared with the UNDP South-South Exchange Forum, the founders of the Human Development Investment Exchange, HDSX.  We also attended the forum Building Partnerships and Financing Cooperation across Developing Countries, which featured presentations of some key pioneer online social marketplaces and social entrepreneurs working with them to share knowledge and obtain resources.

In his introductory speech, Yiping Zhou, Director of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation in UNDP, noted that Fortune Magazine has recently added corporate social responsibility to their rankings, which once again confirms the trend of the social responsibility making its way into corporations’ business, away from just being a side topic.

He also noted the current mind shift in UN, moving away from building capability and implementing projects themselves, to acting as an enabler for local initiatives building the capacity where it is needed and adapted to local conditions.

Francisco Simplicio, heading the HDSX initiative, mentioned three main trends he sees in social markets:

• Trend 1: Moving towards Social Business (from classical charity)
• Trend 2: An increasing number of new investors and players
• Trend 3: Evolvement of facilitation services and platforms

The main driver behind the HDSX, which is currently being piloted, is that great solutions in social markets have difficulty scaling up. So what they aim to do is to facilitate the sharing of best practices, as well as attract more social investors.

Tamzin Ractliffe, founder of the Global Federation of Social Investment Exchanges, GSIX, talked about the need for making the entire continuum of social return only -> social and financial return projects and organizations investible. Creating marketplaces will reward initiatives combining doing good with doing well.

Virginia Davis Floyd of the social business METRAF GIE told a vivid story of the difficulties of finding investors for their nutrition project (despite a genuine business plan, having onboarded important partners, and being able to offer investors a combined social and financial return on investment!), and was thrilled to get the opportunity to access social investors via a marketplace.

Several of the social entrepreneurs present were also keen to stay in touch with us at Socential, and evaluate future collaboration opportunities, such as attracting investments from the Swiss market and benchmarking leading social enterprises in Switzerland.