The Emergence of Social Entrepreneurship in Haiti

The term social entrepreneurship is not new but during the past decade its interests have increased rapidly around the world while its field is still young and fragmented (Gawell, 2013). We believe that in one way or the other, the main objective of social entrepreneurship is to solve social, economic and environmental problems for sustainable development goals. One of the development challenges is the fact that Haiti has 0.47 as Human Development Index (HDI) figuring 168th among 187 countries with 58.6 % of the population living under the poverty line and 24.6% under the extreme poverty line with less than 1$UD per day (PNUD & MCI, 2014). Despite the fact that Haiti has a unique know-how that is passed down for generations in the area of craft, small industry and in the processing of products, social entrepreneurship has not taken its roots as it should have. Importantly, to get where they are today, it is undeniable that developed nations leaned the strengths of their development on human capital to produce physical/material capital. Most often, the human capital is utilized to produce strong public policies which enable the economic growth. The value of using human capital as a pillar for economic growth proved itself for Asian nations with an annual economic growth of 6.9% between 1980 and 1990 against 1.5% for Latin America (Gener, 2005). Thus, in this paper, we looked at the Emergence of Social Entrepreneurship for economic growth in Haiti.