The Paris Peace Forum is an international high-level event to discuss global governance issues, cooperate and push forward concrete innovative solutions. It brings together, each year, heads of states, governments, international organizations, private sector companies and civil society organizations to address pressing international challenges.
The 4th edition took place from 11 November to 13 November 2021 in a hybrid format dedicated to bridging the global gaps and improving global governance for post Covid world. This edition gathered global governance actors around the following priorities:
- Fighting against the Covid-19 crisis: global health governance, social impact, new tools
- Better governing global commons: climate, oceans, outer space
- Better governing digital world: AI, cybersecurity, harmful content
- Fighting fake news and threats to the press
- Protecting civic space in times of Covid-19
- Achieving equality between men and women
- Strengthening South-South cooperation
- Reforming capitalism through the impact economy
Following a competitive Call for Projects launched in May 2021 to select innovative initiatives presenting concrete solutions for a new global governance and a human economy, our project “MedUp! Promoting social entrepreneurship in the Mediterranean region” funded by the European Union and led by Oxfam Italia in partnership with European and Southern Mediterranean partners in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine was selected among the 80 most innovative international projects considered as having a great impact in terms of reforming capitalism through impact economy.
The Forum represented a unique opportunity for MedUp! and the other selected projects to benefit from visibility and exposure, to share the experience acquired on social entrepreneurship since 2018 as well as to share our evidence-based views on global governance issues and interact with and meet experts and decision-makers.
The event consisted in three days of insightful panel discussions among the most important players in global governance. As Oxfam Italia, on November 13th, we had the honor to take part at the session: Pact for Impact: Mobilizing forces for social and solidarity economy.
Moderated by Frédéric Bailly (Member of the Board Of Directors, SOS Group) and starting with a video contribution of Olivia Gregoire (Secretary of State for Social Economy in France), the panel gave the opportunity to Oxfam Italia’s Director Roberto Barbieri to take part in an interesting panel discussion on Social Economy as a key to reform capitalism together with other high-level speakers such as Sir Ronald Cohen (Chairman, Global Steering Group for Impact Investment), Ms. Elise Pierette Memong Memo (Coordinator, RESSCAM – SG RAESS) and Jeroo Billimoria (Co-Founder of Catalyst 2030).
Roberto brought into the panel a concrete example of a promising and successful regional project which is stimulating social entrepreneurship at the national and regional ecosystem level in the Mediterranean. Key elements stressed during the discussion were: the meaning of social entrepreneurship and the uniqueness of its business model representing a concrete solution to long lasting unresolved social and environmental problems in crisis contexts; the importance of promoting an ecosystem and gender transformative approach that allow to break silos and facilitate the interaction among key actors of the policy, service and business levels (macro, meso and micro); the importance of setting up a well-integrated national and international partnerships to implement coordinated action plans to address the ecosystem challenges; the opportunity to enhance national policy frameworks for social entrepreneurship by bringing at the table the social enterprises and having their voice to influence the policy level from their own day to day perspective; the importance of improving the impact measurement in order to facilitate access to capital for social enterprises.
It emerged clearly that to change capitalism we must act globally and Social Entrepreneurship actors have a role to play especially in emerging countries. You can access the full panel discussion “Pact for Impact: Mobilizing forces for social and solidarity economy” where MedUp! learning were shared
