Issue: Eco Africa: Going Beyond Business

Social entrepreneur Janice Ashby realized that providing jobs to the women of Zimbabwe wasn't enough

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On one of her many trips from New York to Zimbabwe, former Saatchi & Saatchi employee Janice Ashby was staying in a quaint hotel on the edge of Victoria Falls, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. She was struck by both the natural beauty of the Falls and the items for sale in the hotel gift shop, especially the work of local artisans fashioned out of handmade paper from the region. Ashby says the paper caught her eye (she had left Saatchi & Saatchi in 1995 to found her own line of handmade paper gifts and stationery)—and sparked her imagination. In 1997, Ashby started a new venture, Eco Africa Craft, partnering with local artisans in Zimbabwe to make paper crafts, working out of a former mission house.

Things were going along relatively well until 2003, when Zimbabwe's economy was devastated by high inflation rates, an epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and a failing infrastructure. Indeed, many of the 400-plus women who now work for Ashby in Harare walked the mile and a half from nearby Chitungwiza, as there are no buses. Hilda, 31, one of Ashby's "shining stars," carried her two-year-old child with her every morning, as day care had become too expensive. Most children were left to be looked after by other children in the community while the elders worked. Hilda and others like her would typically work a 10-hour day before returning home to little food and no clean water. The $1.50 Hilda makes each day, an above-average salary in a country where unskilled workers make about $10 a month, goes toward taking care of the 10 extended family members she lives with—in a two-bedroom house with no electricity.

Under such conditions, many women were finding it difficult to come to work, and Ashby realized that she needed to provide more than jobs. In 2007 she started a nonprofit to complement the paper-crafting business. Through private donations and profits from Eco Africa Craft, Eco Africa Social Ventures provides desperately needed services that allow the artisans to go to work and provide for their families, including day care, clean water, and scholarships to educate their children. Every day workers are provided with a hot lunch.

Eco Africa Social Ventures is what Ashby calls the "compassion component" of her business. Social entrepreneurs, she says, have a responsibility to improve lives. "It's the willingness to start a for-profit enterprise but with the component of doing good and making a difference in the world," she says. "That compassion component is often a risky business for the people who start them because it's often in underdeveloped countries, which normal entrepreneurs would run a mile from."

Paula Lehman is an editorial assistant for BusinessWeek in New York.