Samaritan's Feet: Social Enterprise with a Successful Business Model

Samaritan's Feet, a charity with an exemplary social entrepreneurship model, has witnessed significant growth over the last few years, when many other NGOs have struggled to stay afloat. Samaritan's Feet distributes shoes to poor kids around the world. The organization's mission is to provide shoes as a vehicle to counter rampant foot-borne related diseases that affect more than 300 million children around the world.

The founder of Samaritan's Feet, Manny Ohonme explains the importance of his mission and the kind of impact it can make by saying, "According to the World Health Organization over one billion people in our world are not able to afford shoes, and close to a million will die, or lose their limbs, from foot-borne related diseases." Ohonme says that his organization realized quite early that merely being dependent on donations was not going to be enough to make a long-term impact. He knew he would have to build a sustainable social enterprise to make a real difference.

The challenge with shoe donations is that even if the shoe is received for free, there are handling and processing costs, warehousing costs and transportation and distribution costs involved. Samaritan's Feet figured that it would have to create a self-sufficient business model in order to deliver meaningful results. It used social innovation and entrepreneurship to create a system that allows it to source, manufacture, process, and distribute a pair of shoes to a poor child in any part of the world for as little as $10.

Samaritan's Feet is now creating a shoe line that will be also be sold at retail stores to generate profits, and use the profits to ramp up its manufacturing facilities. This social investment and business model will help the organization to provide more value to needy children by being able to produce the shoes in better quality and appropriate sizes, shapes and colors.

Ohonme believes that it is possible to create more social entrepreneurs around the world who can get associated with their social business model. The organization hopes that it will be able to identify qualified unemployed or under-employed individuals and make them shoe distributors. Therefore, the entire value chain can be created to help the needy and poor at every step.

Ohonme has a word of advice for new social enterprise start-ups: "At the end of the day, you have to implement business principles and virtues that allow you to be able to make the same types of decisions that a for-profit entity has to make. You have got to have the right staff, the right product, the right services, and you've got to ensure that you are delivering value to the people you serve."

Photo Credit: madlyn