Do Social Entrepreneurs Need to Speak In Terms of Human Rights?

Dr. Paul Farmer exams AIDS patient Thelemaque Innocent in Haiti (via St. Petersburg Times)

Watching the Skoll Foundation's recent short video overview of social entrepreneurship, I was struck anew by the story of Muhammad Yunus' $27 loan that launched what would become known as "microfinance." What struck me, however, was not the "innovation" of the business model, but instead the fact that that loan was an affirmation of a human right - the right to credit.

In our society, it has been easy to think of credit simply as a little card that lets you buy more things with money you don't have. But as the economic crisis has reminded us so dramatically, credit is at its best, a tool for enabling people to pursue a better future. What Yunus did was reject the assumption that poor people are unworthy of our trust or incapable of making smart financial decisions, and trade it in for an assumption that they too deserved, indeed had the right, to the same opportunity.

This reminds me of the opening of Paul Farmer's "Loyalist Critique" at the Skoll World Forum last year, a speech I just can't seem to get enough of quoting. In the speech, Farmer shares the mixed emotions he felt when he was notified that he was to be awarded a Skoll Award. On the one hand, of course, he was honored and excited about the support of his work at Partners in Health. But on the other hand, he was dismayed.

What exactly is a social entrepreneur? ... Part of me winced when I acknowledged that yes, we live in an era in which simply seeking to provide high quality medical care to the world's poorest is considered innovative and entrepreneurial... Shouldn't we have offered such services to those who need them long, long ago? Shouldn't we have designed systems to get around or solve the health problems faced by the worlds bottom billion?

What Farmer was referring to was human rights. Indeed, in the climax of his speech he went on to say:

We need to be aware that each of the terms and concepts and tools we’ve developed can be used to deny the destitute access to goods and services that sometimes should be rights, not commodities. Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay some sort of users fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?

I wonder in how many cases the "innovation" of a social entrepreneurs comes down to rejiggering business models to better distribute at scale the goods or services to which all people have rights? If everyone has a right to high-quality healthcare, how do we provide that in the absence of expenses pharmaceuticals and pristine hospitals? If everyone has a right to quality education, how do we deliver that in the face of variable materials and overworked teachers?

And if it is the case that so much of the work of social entrepreneurs stems from human rights denied, why don't we speak in those terms more often? Why don't we explore what this implies for our the way we rethink the structures that dominate our society? Is seems to me that this may be the essential context for talking about "scaling" our innovation.