Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia (ISEA)

The Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia (ISEA) is a learning and action network set up by social enterprises and social enterprise resource institutions and scholars to catalyse knowledge creation, capacity development and movement building for social entrepreneurship in the region.

Over the past decades, a growing number of civil society organisations (CSOs) have recognised the importance of engagements in the market as a critical area of development work. A major push factor for this phenomenon is the concern of CSOs for sustainability, a concern that has many dimensions:

• Their own capacity to continue their development initiatives as their traditional sources of funds – in the form of grants from public and private sources, both local and foreign – have become scarce.

• Concern for the sustainability of project impacts or the need for sustaining mechanisms for services beyond finite project time frames. 

• The realisation of development organisations of the importance of socioeconomic interventions and the economic empowerment of the poor in building sustainable communities.