M.B.A.s who want to save the world

When Brendan Baker applied to the M.B.A. program at the prestigious Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, getting accepted turned out to be the simple part. The real challenge for the 28-year-old from Vancouver: coming up with $90,000 to cover tuition and living costs, and just two months before the start of classes this fall. For a lot of M.B.A.s setting their sights on high-paying jobs at consulting firms and investment banks, that’s a problem easily solved with a bank loan. Not so for Baker, who plans to do a very different kind of M.B.A. He wants to study in a growing field known as social entrepreneurship.

Often dubbed the “do-gooders’ M.B.A.,” social entrepreneurship is about turning the hard skills of business school toward more altruistic ends, such as fighting poverty or improving the lot of the less fortunate. It’s business, but with a social agenda. Or it’s charity, but run like a business. It’s also a career path more likely to land Baker a job launching small social ventures in the developing world than raking in a six-figure salary on Bay Street. “People like me tend to fall into a little bit of a gap where it’s tough to justify the cost [of an M.B.A.] and there are very few scholarships available,” says Baker, speaking from a library at the University of Cambridge, where’s he finishing another master’s degree.

Baker, an engineer by training who has worked for Engineers Without Borders, is taking a big risk. Unable to raise so much money in such a short time, his Oxford plans are still up in the air. But he’s just one of thousands of new M.B.A.s and M.B.A. hopefuls—from Canada, the U.S. and around the world—who are eager to make a similar leap, whether that involves bringing entrepreneurial best practices to a non-profit in the developed world or lending newly acquired marketing or finance skills to communities and small businesses in the Third World.

There’s no hard data on just how big social entrepreneurship is, but the demand is there and growing fast, says Tal Dehtiar, president of the Canadian-based MBAs Without Borders (MWB). Modelled on groups such as Doctors Without Borders, which has long sent physicians to global crisis zones, MWB is an international organization that places grads with M.B.A.-level business skills in places that need them, from India to Ecuador. “Last year alone we had over 2,000 M.B.A.s applying for 23 projects,” adds Dehtiar.

Dehtiar, along with colleague Michael Brown, founded the organization four years ago, after earning his M.B.A. from DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. “While I was doing my M.B.A. I thought, all this knowledge is great but there’s got to be a different way to use it.” Dehtiar had already spent a year building a small non-profit in Costa Rica and an agribusiness in Belize, and saw a market for an organization that could bring young business graduates together with communities in need. The organization, for instance, recently sent one M.B.A. to Ethiopia, where he spent three months helping 31 coffee co-operatives organize themselves to have their beans certified as fair trade. The end result was over $100,000 in new revenue for the coffee farmers this year alone.

This fall, MWB is embarking on a tour of Canadian business schools to talk to students about the social impact business can have. Dehtiar says soaring demand from students is driving his organization and others like it, with business schools responding to a changing market: “We’re not forcing this on people. They’re saying ‘give us more.’ ” Dehtiar used to work in sales for a pharmaceutical company, and he says the loss in earnings that comes with the job is ultimately a small price to pay for the personal rewards of his line of work. “I was making about a hundred grand; now, I’m not making close to as much—but I love every day of the job.”

Three years ago, Bangladeshi economist Mohammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work with microcredit—a way of fighting poverty and spurring investment by offering tiny loans to poor people without access to traditional banks. In doing so, Yunus became perhaps the most well-known social entrepreneur, and helped turn the field into the latest business buzzword. But despite its rising popularity, defining precisely what social entrepreneurship involves can be tricky. Most economists agree that the point of a business, particularly a publicly traded company, is simple: to maximize profits and make money for investors. But social entrepreneurship turns that approach on its head. Profits become merely a means for the enterprise to accomplish its social mission. Unlike the corporate social responsibility movement that swept business schools beginning in the 1990s, and which pushed to make social concerns an important business consideration, a social enterprise makes social concerns the whole point of its business.