Lieve Fransen is the Director responsible for Europe 2020: Social Policies in Directorate-General Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission. In preparation for the GlobalizerX Summit on Employment, we wanted to get to know her story better, chat about her work and the European social entrepreneurship policy, as well as find out what social innovations excite her and how she sees the future of this sector.
Ashoka: What’s the role of the European Commission in supporting social entrepreneurs?
Lieve Fransen: When I arrived at the Commission, one of the first things I told my staff was to stop looking only at the public administration of public services, and to focus also on harnessing the innovative approaches put forward by social entrepreneurs. Throughout my life, I’ve worked with the private sector, NGOs and entrepreneurs and I think social entrepreneurs are key in generating social outcomes. However, I don’t think either they are the panacea for the unemployment problems we have in Europe. Social entrepreneurs shape a more entrepreneurial culture and instill the value of doing good while doing well, which could indeed have a long-term impact on our economy and the way new jobs are created.
From the public administration point of view, I think it is essential to understand that we cannot do the job for the entrepreneurs, but what we can do is to create incentives, provide appropriate mentorship, promote a favorable culture so that entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship can thrive.
Ashoka: Tell us about your personal journey. How and why are you where you are now? Is there any particular experience that had a changemaking impact on your career path?
Fransen: It was early on in my childhood that my parents discovered my drive and motivation to change things. When I decided to study medicine it was because I wanted to improve people’s lives in the developing world and my medical degree would have helped me to do that. In one of my first jobs in Africa, I was in charge of 300,000 people and I was the only doctor. In front of the hospital, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Northern Mozambique, there was a queue of thousands of people standing in the sun outside waiting to be seen by a doctor. How was I supposed to see 300,000 people? Some people would have probably run away: this was really not something I was trained for. But I was there to stay. Given the number of the patients, I figured that the only way to deal with such a situation was to focus on a systemic approach, combining the provision of efficient medical treatments with prevention activities. If there were not enough nurses, I would train mothers to stay with the children in the hospital, which is now a general practice! This is how I started to develop policies.
I never imagined working for the European Commission. I was in Kenya when AIDS was discovered and 10% of my patients were affected. This led me to be one of the first reporters in the US talking about AIDS in Africa. After my PhD at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, I was speaking about AIDS as a developmental threat rather than just a disease. A Commissioner heard me and asked me to come to the Commission to start a program for AIDS, then for health and later on moved towards communication and the social policy agenda.
Ashoka: How can a public official innovate inside a European institution?
Fransen: I’d say we need first to be in a listening mode. It’s time we took a deeper look into the needs of the private sector and support businesses to create the jobs, rather than getting in their way or us taking over. Then, we need to stop looking at problems, and instead see them as challenges expecting solutions. We need more “bureaucrackers”, people who use the bureaucracy, the existent tools to do something and instead of coming up with problems, presenting the possible solutions.
Ashoka: Could you tell us about a social innovation you’re excited about?
Fransen: I love working with Video Volunteers, an Indian social enterprise which aims to ensure that the voices of the poor are heard in mainstream media. As member of their Board, I often spend my holidays working with them in India. Video Volunteers provides phones to untouchables to make videos about their lives and their problems – it can be about everything, but they all need to have a solution in mind. They started small, but now they’ve covered up the whole country, they feed TV stations and sell to CNN, influencing mainstream media on the issues and perspectives of marginalized communities.
Ashoka: How do you think the social entrepreneurship sector will look ten years from now?
Fransen: Europe needs a more young, mobilizing, “yes we can” spirit. I’d like to see more young and senior people taking risks. Tapping into the experience of senior/retired entrepreneurs could be a great opportunity to increase the success rate of social enterprises.
We’ve waited for too long for the state to solve the problems, and I hope social entrepreneurs change our society so that we stop being passive and go find solutions ourselves. That would for sure create a more energetic society.
This interview was conducted and edited by Laura Catana, Program Coordinator of THIS WORKS initiative for employment at Ashoka, and together with this article is part of a series of posts on this key challenge, inspiring citizen action tackling unemployment.
