Eighteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Poverty is described as both the lack of resources for basic living and deprivations of social and civil liberties. With the recent onset of the COVID-19 pandemic global poverty rates have shot up dramatically threatening to reverse the progress made in the recent past and plunge many back into poverty once more. Social enterprise is known by many to be a potential alternative towards the alleviation of poverty. Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that are driven by an explicit social objective to aid marginalized and excluded communities while doing so in a way that secures profits for financial sustainability. They are commonly known for being able to generate employment opportunities for the poor while addressing other facets of poverty like housing, social exclusion, healthcare, and education. This paper includes a systematic literature review to determine the research landscape of social enterprise and poverty alleviation literature. Specifically, this paper identifies the key research areas, concepts, theoretical approaches, and research gaps that underlie the field of social enterprise and poverty alleviation literature. The research behind social enterprise and poverty alleviation literature seems to be limited or underdeveloped. Through the integration and synthesizing of the existing literature, we were able to identify the existing research gaps and we hope that this will provide more clarity to the field and provide directions for future research endeavors.