Tea Kekelia
Title: 'Social enterprise in development context: the case of Georgia'
Supervisor: Dr. Veiko Lember
Opponent: Piret Tõnurist, MSc., Junior Research Fellow
Defense: 27 January 2014
Abstract: The current research paper will analyze the role of social enterprises on economy, its opportunities and limits in developing context, considering all related concepts which help to emerge this kind of enterprises and the challenges which hinder their development processes. It identifies the place of the social enterprises in the market economy and necessity of governmental power to cope with several issues. The empirical part is based on the case of Georgia which gives practical example of how social enterprises are operating in a particular country and identifies their concrete mission and limits. The case study defines the challenges of governance that have numerous negative consequences which are overcome by the great support of international aid and building attractive environment for all levels of the state. The theoretical part of the thesis is oriented to introduce the concept of social entrepreneurship and then to identify what challenges the social enterprises have in case of Georgia. It will be evident that the third sector of Georgia meets the same challenges that are defined in most academic research papers which are also discussed in the conceptual part of the thesis. Defining these challenges will help to identify which fields require improvement to develop social enterprises in Georgia.
Keywords: social enterprises, third sector, social economy, civil society, co-operations,NGOs.
