Perhaps the most critical and progressive part of our work is our earnest use of the principles of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship may be conventionally defined as the application of business and management orthodoxies to achieve social profits. Our understanding builds upon that definition: we activate social entrepreneurship by making efficient economic investment and utilizing the key inputs of innovation and technology to achieve maximum social and economic return. The idea is to instigate overall positive and sustainable social change. Not only is our business model one of social entrepreneurship, but every project we design is based on those principles. We work with communities to formulate new ideas and approaches to address social challenges, with the ambition to incite widespread change in social systems. We focus on the empowerment of youth and women – socially, economically, educationally - because this is the major social area that we would like to improve.

As a business that embraces the principles of social entrepreneurship in our own operation and in the projects we support, we encounter minimal amounts of overhead and engage in a continuous effort to seek new ways to decrease overhead costs further. We do not consider ourselves a “non-profit” because our goal is to make big profits – primarily social, but economic stability and sustainability is a complementary goal. We use the label “not-for-profit” to indicate that economic return is not the focus but that a profit is still made, and to differentiate ourselves form for-profit corporations.

Our use of technology is integral to our ability to maintain virtually no overhead and maximize the efficiency of our operations. We innovatively and efficiently use technology; likewise, we offer the people we serve access to technology. Access to new technologies in health and education can have tremendously positive effects on communities, and the opportunities presented to people in developing countries who are skilled in IT are vast. An example of our innovative use of technology is our technology-driven, interactive, online fundraising model: micro-goals. Please visit our donate page to learn more about micro-goals.

Other qualities that make GlobalEyes a unique not-for-profit are:

• GlobalEyes is a distinctly transparent organization. Please visit our transparency page for information about Bare Naked Org, our transparency project.
• The projects we support and initiate are unique and the partners we collaborate with are special. We make a point to integrate indigenous knowledge and to work with indigenous organizations; our projects are always deeply participatory. (click here to learn more about participatory approach)

  All of our interventions involve a deep participatory approach, that actively involves the community at all stages: the identification of needs an intervention will fulfill, the design of intervention activities and the ongoing evaluation and improvement and expansion planning of the intervention. Dan Cornell, in his essay Participatory development: an approach sensitive to class an gender, states that development organizations should serve the role of a bridge, linking targeted rural populations with inaccessible tools and information (Cornell, 1999). We agree that our duty is to facilitate development by supplying resources and opportunities that are not available to the communities we serve, and to allow the communities to be the true catalysts of growth and improvement. Beneficiary participation in study design and implementation has been proven to ensure that resultant projects activities are appropriate and that the most vulnerable populations are targeted (Narayan, 1997). The deep participatory approach endeavors not only to achieve more appropriate and equitable distribution of resources but also to inform and incorporate local knowledge and guidance into every aspect of the program’s design, deployment, monitoring and evaluation.

  Though beneficiaries may seem to offer few resources, our interventions hinge on the premise that entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and the participation of the women, their children and the greater community are the true assets utilized by our work. It is important to note that our interventions fosters the realization of the entrepreneurial skills of women and children, and calls for the expression of those talents in every aspect of program development and deployment. Our interventions also harness the invaluable indigenous knowledge and practice of the local people to inform and direct projects. Beneficiaries are often called on to mold their own prescription for the specific challenges they my face and all intervention activities will be planned and conducted under the control of participants.

  We ask the communities we serve to identify problems and prescribe how they should be solved, while we simultaneously investigate the problem along with possible solutions in the community and beyond. Then, we make a collective plan and supply the resources and technology. Our job is to strictly monitor and evaluate the efforts to be sure we are achieving a program’s objectives. We believe that comprehensive monitoring and evaluation is essential for any successful business or intervention. We formulate and enforce comprehensive and ongoing monitoring and evaluation systems for our work as an organization and for our interventions, to ensure that our work is efficient and effective. Please visit our partners and projects page to see who we’re currently working with.
• Environmental stewardship is an important part of our work, which is especially appropriate given that many of the projects we support have agricultural elements, and because many of poverty’s most dire challenge are closely related to the environment and may be most efficiently resolved using environmentally-friendly strategies.
• GlobalEyes works to invoke the “Big 5” interventions of development, as identified by renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs: agriculture, education and health, water security, electricity and transportation and communication. Our interventions also strive to contribute to the global effort to achieve the 2015 United Nations Millennium Development Goals in developing countries.