HK a 'likely hub' for Bay Area's social enterprise ecosystem

Hong Kong could aspire to be the hub for social enterprises and social innovation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area when partnership opportunities arise, according to the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society (CAPS).

With different specializations of the 11 cities in the Bay Area cluster, the constraint is how to deploy skills to develop social enterprises in the region.

Hong Kong's strengths in the financial services industry can help social enterprises, while the Bay Area's niches in logistics and manufacturing can endow different skills to develop different types of organizations in the region.

"Hong Kong has a relatively more-sophisticated ecosystem with a number of diverse actors of social enterprises playing different roles, complementing each other and creating synergy, and creating more differentiated robust ecosystems in the early stages than other countries and regions," CAPS Chief Executive Ruth Shapiro said.

The HKSAR's social enterprise ecosystem, along with those of Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and Thailand, have been studied in CAPS' comparative analysis of social enterprises and impact investing in Asia. The survey studied 584 social enterprises and interviewed 140 stakeholders in the six Asian economies.The Hong Kong government, for instance, has worked with various universities and intermediaries to create many business incubators to nurture social enterprise startups, Shapiro said.

In Hong Kong, the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development (SIE) Fund had granted seed and matching funds, ranging from HK$100,000 ($12,800) to HK$3.6 million as of August this year, to organizations, addressing poverty and social exclusion, including social enterprises. Social entrepreneurial projects are eligible for grants of up to HK$3 million from the Home Affairs Department and Social Welfare Department.

SIE Fund intermediaries have supported 3,979 potential social entrepreneurs with capacity-building programs and funded 150 ventures, according to the CAPS report.

"Hong Kong has made resources available to social enterprises," CAPS Director of Research Mehvesh Ahmed said. "Social innovation projects in the fields of social inclusion and poverty alleviation are more likely to obtain funding."

The report said Hong Kong's social enterprises would prefer more government support in three areas — providing grant funding, recognizing social enterprises as a separate entity, and making it easier for social enterprises to win public-sector contracts.

There are at least 1.2 million social enterprises in the six Asian economies studied, and these economies are spending at least $100 million in direct and indirect support for social enterprises, plus an additional $900 million for general startups per year, the CAPS report said.

With 60 percent of the world's total population and a 50 percent share of the world's GDP, Asia is still underrepresented in the impact investment landscape with the region receiving just 16 percent of the $502 billion global impact investment, the report added.