Go Green Promoting Innovative Social Impact in Iraq

Social enterprises are sustainable businesses with primarily social or environmental objectives. While the social enterprise adapts the ways that businesses function, their primary objective is to maximize social benefit. Social enterprises use business tactics and modalities to fix, or minimize the negative effect of, a certain issue in society. In Iraq, this concept is new, however, SIDA, alongside Oxfam’s partners and the Iraq Response Innovation Lab, launched an incubator open to local NGOs (Nongovernmental Organizations) willing to create sustainable social enterprises.

The Social Enterprise Incubation process started in January 2021, with contacting multiple local NGOs and encouraging them to apply for a social enterprise project. These local organizations had worked with Oxfam previously and had already been assessed and evaluated. Throughout the process, training sessions were delivered to 14 LNGOs on what makes a social enterprise, problem identification and solution creation. This phase was important as the concept of social enterprises is new to the local NGOs and varies from one context to another across the world. In Iraq, this concept is usually unsupported and the distinction from private companies is not clear. These 14 LNGOs expanded their knowledge and brainstormed ideas relevant to their work; they submitted their proposals to the Partnership Department of Oxfam Iraq and to the IRIL who evaluated their proposals according to the criteria of socially impactful start-ups. In February 2021, two LNGOs, WAND and SSORD Organizations, were selected and received seed funding for a total of 30K USD. They began implementing their projects in April 2021.