Char­maine Dais­ley

Chris­tine Souf­frant is a young, so­cial en­ter­prise pro­po­nent. A rel­a­tive­ly new and rev­o­lu­tion­ary way of do­ing busi­ness, so­cial en­ter­prise means us­ing busi­ness tenets and goals to help solve so­ci­ety's most dis­tress­ing prob­lems. The so­cial en­ter­prise busi­ness is set up to pro­vide a so­lu­tion for an is­sue that ex­ists in coun­tries with crises such as lack of potable wa­ter, lack of en­er­gy sources for poor house­holds, un­der­de­vel­oped busi­ness and trade, ab­sence of san­i­tary liv­ing con­di­tions in the home, poor agri­cul­tur­al sys­tems, and lim­it­ed ac­cess to prop­er health­care and ed­u­ca­tion.

In short, so­cial en­ter­pris­es are built on the foun­da­tion of want­i­ng to im­prove the lives of the poor and un­der­priv­i­leged of the world. And that's ex­act­ly what Souf­frant does.

At 26 years old, Souf­frant, a so­cial en­tre­pre­neur, is the founder of Vend­edy, which has suc­cess­ful­ly de­vel­oped the world's on­ly dig­i­tal plat­form for mar­ket­ing the work of street ar­ti­san ven­dors liv­ing in third world mar­kets. In build­ing her en­ter­prise, she has gained in­sight to the sto­ries and strug­gles of street ven­dors in 30 coun­tries while trav­el­ling as a stu­dent on a Bill Gates schol­ar­ship.

"Vend­edy is a so­cial en­ter­prise start-up that is digi­tis­ing the street vend­ing in­dus­try via mo­bile tech­nol­o­gy," Souf­frant ex­plains.

"For the first time, street ven­dors can up­load pho­tos of their prod­ucts on­line via mo­bile so that a trav­el­ling con­sumer can search, pur­chase, and pay for an item via SMS. Lo­cal agents de­liv­er the prod­uct to the con­sumer's ho­tel dur­ing their stay," she said.

The mo­bile net­work was in be­ta in Haiti. The start­up aims to launch the first phase of the net­work in the Caribbean this sum­mer.

She added that "as the Vend­edy net­work ex­pands, it aims to help trav­el­ling con­sumers ac­cess re­mote ar­ti­san de­signs that come with a sto­ry from over 150+ coun­tries in re­al time."

Vend­edy's plat­form of com­merce is the huge­ly pop­u­lar glob­al mo­bile SMS ser­vice. This af­ford­able and re­li­able plat­form is used to stream­line the en­tire sale, pur­chase, and pay­ment trans­ac­tion for the street ar­ti­san and the trav­el­ling con­sumer, and in­her­ent­ly min­imis­es the ar­ti­san's cost of get­ting his prod­ucts to mar­ket.

This so­cial en­ter­prise not on­ly pro­vides a co­he­sive mar­ket­place for street ar­ti­san ven­dors, it goes fur­ther to of­fer the hum­ble street artist an in­stant glob­al con­sumer base, plus pro­fes­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion and mar­ket­ing around the world–all for a small com­mis­sion; most prof­its go to the right­ful own­ers, the street ar­ti­sans who pro­duced what was sold.

In fur­ther high­light­ing the im­pact Vend­edy is mak­ing in rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing the street vend­ing in­dus­try, and im­prov­ing the lives of thou­sands around the world, Souf­frant ex­plains that ap­prox­i­mate­ly two bil­lion peo­ple around the globe sur­vive on less than US$2 a day and many earn their dai­ly ex­is­tence by sell­ing hand­made crafts and art on the street. Sad­ly, these mi­cro-busi­ness own­ers lack rep­re­sen­ta­tion and are of­ten ex­ploit­ed by whole­salers who pur­chase their prod­ucts at a very low cost and re­sell them in West­ern mar­kets at a sig­nif­i­cant markup. This, ul­ti­mate­ly, cre­ates a vi­cious cy­cle of pover­ty among street ar­ti­sans. The good news is that Vend­edy is now on the scene to of­fer fair trade to these ven­dors.

"Dur­ing the be­ta launch of the mo­bile net­work, street ven­dors who used Vend­edy earned nine to 14 times their an­nu­al in­come in weeks be­cause they are paid a fair price for their goods' mar­ket val­ue, as op­posed to lo­cal un­der­val­ued prices, Souf­frant ex­plains.

"On the oth­er hand, 66 per cent of glob­al con­sumers want to pur­chase unique items that cre­ate a so­cial im­pact, but can on­ly ac­cess them via frag­ment­ed chan­nels like NGOs, bou­tique web­sites and spo­radic craft fairs. Fur­ther­more, many of the 1.1 bil­lion peo­ple who trav­el the world an­nu­al­ly search for prod­ucts that sym­bol­ise their ex­pe­ri­ence abroad. But they buy items at air­ports, ho­tels and malls de­spite the fact that most au­then­tic prod­ucts are lo­cat­ed in street mar­kets. We want to lever­age mo­bile tech­nol­o­gy to re­vamp this glob­al sup­ply chain and con­nect street mar­kets to glob­al con­sumers."

Chris­tine's pas­sion for the sup­port of street ar­ti­sans stems from her own ex­pe­ri­ence of know­ing the strug­gles of fam­i­ly mem­bers who were street ven­dors in Haiti and the streets of New York.