SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
&
THE DEPRIVED
Case Study 1
Some of the most deprived areas in the UK are located in the City of Bradford. These areas consist mostly of the inner city wards such as Great Horton Ward, Manningham Ward and City Ward and are low-income areas which are heavily reliant on welfare. It has been suggested that this is partly due to a lack of important institutional resource.
It was noticed that there was a trend among workers in the area that their work or training schedules were disrupted due to childcare problems. This meant that absenteeism among workers with children in these areas was high. This resulted in a number of workers loosing their employment and in many cases individuals where not able to work at all due to being unable to secure child care. This problem was amplified due to the area being relatively low income, which means in many cases it is uneconomical for people to work as their wages would not cover expensive childcare costs.
In 1997 The Community Childcare Initiative (CCI) was founded to tackle this problem. Up until this point childcare had been run by small providers who could care for a small number of children in their centres. Often there were very few vacancies in these childcare bursaries and prices are expensive per child. However the CCI’s childcare model was different, they decided to charge as little as possible per child. Their structure was to make a small profit across a large number of customers instead of charging high process for very few children.
However, soon after launch the CCI found that parents resisted this model of childcare. Due to the larger numbers, formal processes had to be used to cope with the large network of centres. Parents didn’t like these formal processes such as the registration process. There ware other problems as well such as the centres not being very close to many customers homes or places of work. This meant that the CCI wasn’t generating as much business as it thought and needed. Due to the low numbers and its low prices it was not generating as much money as it needed to make a profit which, therefore, meant it was unable to pay its staffs salaries and other costs. Eventually this resulted in the CCI closing its doors despite carrying out its original business plan.
Case Study 2
Apart from the large cites and metropolitan areas in China, there are many deprived communities. These communities are in less or underdeveloped regions and cities such as Sichuan. In these areas poverty and a lack of education and skills is the main problem for the population. For women, especially, it is nearly impossible to gain access to schools. The reason, therefore, is that parents in China rather let their son learn and they are more willing to make an investment to male descendants. Due to the lack of knowledge and education, women are easily exploited by industries and have to work under very poor conditions.
In Sichuan, the most commonly exploited part to the employees was unpaid overtime and a bad and unhealthy working environment. The owners try to reduce their cost of production and save as much money as possible. Consequently, women, who lack in education and knowledge about better working conditions, had to accept the unfair treatment until FFP noticed this problem.
The Firefish Project (FFP) was established in 2006. It is meant to empower exploited women with alternative employment. It aims to provide a legitimate employment opportunity for poor women from exploitative industries and deprived communities. FFP decided to make clothing since the materials could easily be sourced in China and the manufacturing requires limited skills or education levels. FFP provides a proper welfare system and carries out a rigorous working policy which is completely different to most of the factories located in Sichuan. FFP provides good working environment and payment for working overtime. On the other hand, they expect employees to work hard within the working hour.
FFP succeeded in generating a better working place and fairer contracts. Many women got aware of the good working conditions FFP offered and wanted to join the project. They were even willing to work harder and produced way more output than in any other common and exploiting factory. Today, more than 500 women are engaged in fairer employment in factories run by the Firefish Project. The heads of FFP are planning to further expand the project to other regions and cities.