Social Entrepreneurs: Their Motivations, Challenges and Contribution

Social entrepreneurs are often seen as social workers and hence their contribution as entrepreneurs is highly underestimated and unacknowledged. For generations people have been practicing social entrepreneurship but its advent as a topic of research by academicians is quite recent. The present paper is an attempt to consolidate the various aspects of social entrepreneurship with special focus on the motivations and challenges faced by social entrepreneurs through an extensive review of literature. The study finds that social entrepreneurs are motivated by compassion rather than profits. Also financial sustainability is often a problem faced by them. They work in the non-profit sector which is driven by a strong reliance on charity, philanthropy and government subsidy.