Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise

The Amazon Conservation Team is mentioned in this Harvard Business Review article “Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise” by The Skoll Foundation President & CEO Sally Osberg and strategy guru Roger Martin.

“ACT’s core innovation was to equip tribal peoples with handheld GPS devices and train them to chart their ancestral lands. The resulting maps enabled them to advocate more effectively for their own interests by supplying the government with information needed for rain forest conservation. With their territories clearly identified, tribal peoples could monitor and protect the land on which their way of life depended. This distributed system of monitoring and conserving significantly outperformed any centralized approach. The balance of power in the struggle with commercial interests was cost-effectively shifted in favor of the indigenous peoples, contributing to more-efficient and more-effective conservation.”