Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation Between Global North and Global South: The Ashoka Case

This chapter maps social initiatives conducted worldwide by social innovators and entrepreneurs part of the Ashoka network, illustrating the general context and trends of these actions. We place particular attention to country specificities, especially the differences between developing economies (the so-called Global South) and countries whose economic performance is already among the highest (the Global North). Our descriptive statistics provide insights on the main areas of Ashoka Fellows’ interventions for each country, and then map these on the social problems detected for the country by international institutions (e.g., WHO, WEF). The results show that responses put in place by social innovators and entrepreneurs in different geographical areas are different according to the typology of economy they operate in.