To some, entrepreneurship come as an epiphany, and quickly becomas an addiction. Asma Mansour is one of them. The founder of the Tunisian Center for Social Entrepreneurship, the first organization dedicated to social entrepreneurship in the country, has been so active that she’s been made an Ashoka Fellow, and was featured in BuzzFeed.
Her whole life, Mansour lived a quiet life in a conservative family that believed women were to take care of the household, and young women to go straight home after school. This all changed when Mansour discovered university clubs and started volunteering. “Volunteering was like opening a window into the world, it was a way of breathing,” she confesses. “I invested a lot of myself into it. I found a passion; it helped me discover myself, and acquire skills.”
The young women was quickly confronted to the limits of university volunteering. “Students don’t plan more than a year in advance, they have to raise funds every year, with no means of measuring the impact [of past actions].” How can you measure [the success] of blood donation awareness campaign, she asks. She then decided to turn her social work into a profession, and to join a company to work on CSR, but discovered that her accountancy diploma was not enough, and had to return to university to get a masters degree in financial engineering. During this period, she managed to raise money from her volunteering networks to attend a conference in Japan. This trip turned out to be more than her first time abroad.
In Japan, she met a social entrepreneur and got acquainted with the idea of the social entrepreneurship, at which point she realized that “it’s possible for a company to have a social mission.” When she flew back, the Tunisian uprising of December 2010 was taking form, making her more convinced than ever that she ought to work to improve her country.
Original article by Aline Mayard
Continue reading at Wamda:
Asma Mansour: Tunisia’s social entrepreneurship pioneer
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