Rethinking social entrepreneurship

January’s Mashreq Conference on Women’s Economic Empowerment was a welcome initiative at a time where socio-economic conditions for women in Lebanon are dire. In addition to a discriminatory legal, political, and social environment, women continue to make up less than 25 percent of the labor force, according to 2018 World Bank estimates. Donor pledges to support women’s economic empowerment are a huge opportunity, but efforts to fund empowering programs often ignore core issues at the heart of Lebanon’s economy. A big concern is the encroachment of social entrepreneurship as a one-size-fits-all approach to women’s roles in the economy. As an emerging terminology into the entrepreneurship ecosystem, it tells women the sky is the limit, but in reality allows the government to shirk its responsibilities while trapping women in a model that has not proven itself to be sustainable. What social entrepreneurship is—and is not Broadly defined social entrepreneurship is an