March 24, 2017 - On a visit to Ashesi’s Social Enterprise class, clean water activist and entrepreneur, Sangu Delle, shared insights into the social entrepreneurship space in Ghana while engaging the members of the class on building enterprises that create impact within their society.
“Where can you actually make a concentrated, powerful impact?” posed Sangu Delle who founded CleanAcwa, an NGO focused on addressing challenges of sanitation and access to water. “And for us, that was water and sanitation - that’s what we’re good at. That matters more than saying a lot of things that sound good when the reality is that; you’re not tackling the actual problem. The focus should be on tackling real issues.”
At Cleanacwa, Sangu Delle and his team are focused on working in underdeveloped regions to spread effective solutions for challenges to water access and waterborne diseases. Sangu is also the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Golden Palm Investments; an investment holding and advisory company focused on building high impact companies in Africa.
“It’s not just about what projects you’re focused on- the transformation should not only be about the impact made on the society,” he said. “As a company, how do you represent those values you are creating. In designing the structure of social enterprises, rather than just borrow from what other people are doing elsewhere, when looking at models especially, from the west, we have to adopt those models in ways that make sense to our local context.”
Designed by Fulbright scholar at Ashesi, Jon Isham, the Social Enterprise class helps guide students through the ropes of creating social enterprises. The new elective builds on global trends of effecting social change on a large scale, while addressing how social enterprises help to unleash social change, what the determinants of success and failure of social enterprises, models of leading social enterprises in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa and mindsets and skills do people needed to successfully run a social enterprise.