The April issue of Catalyst 2030 Newsletter shared the exciting announcement that the UN General Assembly had just adopted the resolution Promoting a Social and Solidarity Economy. For the social innovation ecosystem, this was affirmation of the decades-long work advocating for a more just economy. The resolution calls on governments to develop and implement national, regional and local strategies in support of a social economy.

A CCW2023 session Social Innovators within the Social Economy held on 2 May, convened representatives of international organisations and governments to explore models for implementing the resolution. Host Dr Francois Bonici, Directof of Schwabb Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Head of Social Innovation at the World Economic Forum, challenged panellists to provide insights to the following questions. What is it? How can we help to implement it further? How can we look to advance the role of social innovators inside the social economy? What are the learnings to be shared by governments, international organisations and practitioners across the world?

You can watch the session recording here.

Building on the UN resolution

Panellists were Raymond Landveld, Economic Affairs Officer UNCTAD, Ruth Paserman, Director DG, Employment Social Affairs and Inclusion at the European Commission, Charles Bodwell, Senior Enterprise Development Specialist at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and Juan Manuel Martinez Louvier, Director of INAES, Mexico.

Introducing the CCW2023 session, Francois provided some background. “We know that around the world, actors in the social economy contribute up to 7% of GDP.” With the current volatility, as well as digital and environment transitions, the risk of driving increased inequality is real and being felt, he explained. In this context, Francois believes that, “A social innovation economy offers significant contributions and models to integrate inclusion and sustainability into these transitions and to deal with some of the volatility that we are experiencing.”

Recognition around the world

“Recognition by international organisations and government around the world is gaining momentum for social economy,” Francois pointed out, providing the following examples. The EU recently launched its Social Innovation Action Plan. The General Conference of the ILO adopted a resolution recognising the contribution of the social and solidarity economy to decent work. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) adopted a set of legal recommendations and the African Union (AU) adopted the Ten-Year Strategy on the Social and Solidarity Economy.

Francois credited Raymond Landveld with stewarding the process of getting the resolution accepted and empowering the session audience with an understanding of the process that would help them to pressurise their government and be part of the feedback.

The panel discussed work that’s currently under way in bringing the social and solidarity economy to life and shared thoughts on how the resolution could be further implemented.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been on the radar. But ChatGPT is the robot that brought it in from the margins. In 2023 people want to understand AI’s uses and its risks. It’s no surprise then that one of the most anticipated CCW2023 sessions was What Does ChatGPT Mean for the Global South?

Session host, Colin McElwee, Co-Founder of Catalyst 2030 and Worldreader, shared ChatGPT’s astonishing 100 million users after two months on the market, predicting, “This is a real before and after moment for our children and our children’s children.”

From radical idea to mainstream

Speaker Chris Capossela, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft, likened the introduction of ChatGPT to personal computers, “a radical idea”, becoming mainstream. “It’s like a PC, the smartphone, even the internet being invented and people starting to figure out how can we use these things to make society a better place.

He was joined by Lindiwe Matlile, Founder of Africa Teen Geeks, who asked “how AI and machine learning could help developing countries where there are a lot of barriers, like a lack of internet access and infrastructure”.

To follow the discussion firsthand, you can watch a video recording here.

In every industry, every country

According to Chris, “Microsoft is trying to figure out how to bring it into every industry, including education, and to every country including (those) in the Global South.” To illustrate MS’s vision for education, he quoted his boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, asking his team to, “Imagine a world in which all eight billion people on the planet have access to a fantastic educator, just through the mobile phone that they use.” But While MS was making a transformative platform available, working with non-profits, public-private-partnerships, ministries of education would still have to happen in order to develop transformative applications, says Chris.

Takeaways from the conversation

• ChatGPT took two months to reach 100 million users-per-month Netflix took 10 years, Twitter five years, Facebook four-and-a-half years, Instagram four years and Tiktok nine months.
• MS is pivoting on the back of AI’s technology platform. It regards this change of technology platform as important and as foundational as the internet.
• It is building AI’s technology into their Bing search engine, Edge search engine browser, GitHub tool for software developers and Azure cloud services.
• People can submit health-related questions, providing symptoms, and ChatGPT4 will generate machine-authored information describing the malady as well as coming up with diagnostic solutions and the type of medication needed.
• ChatGPT4 is creating new possibilities to transform the world in support of the SDGs, through the provision of the platform. But the transformative opportunities still have to be applied. MS has unlocked the tools to machine learning and to promoting digital literacy, but cannot not do everything. Instead a collaborative model would need to be followed. People can explore the technology to the limits of its uses to generate their own solutions.
• Only time will tell whether the creative industries are due to be disrupted by AI and the impact of machine learning. But AI can take over the more mundane jobs, freeing up time for creativity.
• On the question of whether jobs might be lost or gained, generative AI is more of a co-pilot than an autopilot. Machine-generated learning is actually an amplifier of human ability. Without human input there is no way it can be active on its own, so it can never do away with humans in jobs particularly in the creative sectors. People in creative industries can co-create while machine-generated learning or AI takes away the drudgery of work.
• On whether AI can promote workplace equity, MS doesn’t have all the answers but is seeing a greater, more accelerated, technology shift.
• Once innovation is born, regulation follows. MS believes that only once limitations have been stretched can its its impact on people and corporations be assessed. But regulations should be used as a tool, not as a weapon. Only with the regular use of Chat GPT4 can a framework of rules with the correct values become important, essential even, to overcome any potential pitfalls these new technology platforms bring us.
• What MS is doing, where it operates, is skilling people for careers and making internet access available for the latest applications. In Africa through Microsoft Airband, an inititiative that promotes digital equity through access to skills, devices and the internet, the company aims to reach 20 million people in rural areas. But they cannot do it all. They need the local connections, with the local problems and solutions which they can apply on their platform to be able to create digital equality.

Three special online exhibitions will be presented by ArtSI during CCW2023 (1-5 May 2023).

The 3D exhibitions offer a unique opportunity to explore important environmental issues through the lens of art and science. Together, they provide a powerful and engaging way to learn about and take action on critical environmental challenges facing our world today.

Comic Gallery

“Comics to Save the World” showcases a selection of inspiring visual stories on environmentalism;

03 May 2023 | 15:00 – 16:00 CEST

Social entrepreneurs working in the mental health space work in stressful environments. In this session we’ll think seriously about how they look after themselves and their families while taking care of their organisations and the people they serve.

We bring together Celina de Sola, Rosemary Gathara and Daniel Lobo – all well known social entrepreneurs in the mental health, wellbeing and resilience space – to talk about what it’s really like to work as founders or chief executives whilst having parental and other significant caregiving responsibilities. We’ll also examine what policy consequences need to be considered by organisations.

The social entrepreneurs featured – based in San Salvador, Kenya and India – bring different stories of culture and context over and above their extensive entrepreneurial experience. The moderator, Chris Underhill, is a grandfather to six grandchildren and a serial social entrepreneur in the field of disability and mental health.

The following recording is from a #CCW2022 session hosted by Emily Kasriel, BBC World Service and Gary White, Water.org and WaterEquity.

Water, A Rising Tide on the Global Agenda: For many people, the global water crisis presents itself as both an economic and humanitarian crisis—an unmitigated risk to global supply chains, profits, and the well-being of communities and populations around the world.