Why has SEWF launched a verification pilot programme?

This blog is the first in a new series on SEWF Verification. New blogs will feature throughout our pilot.

Providing verification and certification for businesses is a business in and of itself, and it is a business that is booming. The market is saturated with companies that will offer opportunities for businesses to be verified or certified for various positive and ethical business practices and/or products and services. This can help businesses gain recognition for work that is genuinely good for people and the planet and in turn help them access new market opportunities by appealing to wider business and consumer audiences. At the same time, it can also be confusing for customers to understand what a certification really means and for businesses to decide which certifications or verifications are worth pursuing.

Since there are so many opportunities to apply for certification or verification, it can also be challenging to discern which might be more indicative of social-washing or greenwashing. This is especially true when there are certifying or verifying organisations that are in it for the business opportunity above all else.

Social enterprises are not immune to this inundation of certification and verification opportunities. In fact, many social enterprises around the world have struggled to gain international, or even local, recognition for their mission orientated work. In most countries, there is no local verification or certification that is specific to social enterprises. Similarly, most countries also lack legal structures designed specifically to help social enterprises register as such and protect their mission from the point of incorporation.

While certain countries do have options for social enterprise verification, many social enterprises who want to gain recognition for their work and to be part of a community of more similarly minded businesses must seek other types of verification and certification opportunities. These opportunities can help give them recognition for things like responsible sourcing, organic products and fair wages and employment practices, but not for their social enterprise business model and all the features and characteristics associated with social enterprises. Yet, for a lot of social enterprises, these opportunities that do exist are neither accessible nor affordable.

After identifying this gap in the market and consulting with partners and stakeholders around the world, SEWF worked to begin developing our verification in coordination with those same partners and stakeholders. Our strong relationships with these groups, which include many of the nationally based certifying intermediary bodies who have been leading the way on verification/certification and social procurement policy in their own countries, allowed us to articulate our global standards for SEWF Verified Social Enterprises and develop a pilot system to begin recognising social enterprises through this verification.

While SEWF announced our intent to launch the Verification Pilot Programme back in September 2021 during a session at SEWF 2021, the work of bringing more definitional clarity, community cohesion and international recognition to the sector tangibly began back in July 2019. Around this time, SEWF worked with a wide team of international intermediary partners and grassroots social enterprises to capture the essence of social enterprise around the world; definitions often varied by country and there were other geographic differences that contributed to international ambiguity around the term ‘social enterprise’.

After broad consultation with many individuals within the SEWF community, we released a document entitled ‘Understanding social enterprise’ that outlined the key characteristics of social enterprise and other features commonly associated with social enterprise despite some variation across regions, cultures and economic systems. At this time in 2019, we believed that using this document to promote and articulate a more cohesive understanding of social enterprise globally, especially from a practitioner perspective, would continue to strengthen the social enterprise movement.

Two years later, it became clear that the ‘big business’ of verification and certification might end up diluting the social enterprise movement if a company that was not as embedded with social enterprises took on the work of verifying them internationally. In response, SEWF was encouraged to launch a programme that ended up becoming SEWF Verification. Since SEWF’s existing ‘Understanding social enterprise’ document had broad global consensus within the social enterprise community, the features and characteristics articulated within it were used to develop the standards against which we would verify social enterprises globally.

SEWF began the process of slowly verifying social enterprises in 2022 and will continue to run our pilot programme up to September 2022. During this period, SEWF Verification is free to social enterprises to encourage as many as possible to get involved with the process and join our growing global community. As a social enterprise ourselves who continuously works collaboratively with grassroots social enterprises and intermediaries alike, this is, and will continue to be, a not-for-profit service designed with the social enterprise community for the social enterprise community. We will continue partnering with our community throughout this pilot to ensure the system is working for social enterprises who need to access it most and that it is adding value to existing certification and verification programmes that are aligned with SEWF Verification.

The next blog in this series on SEWF Verification will outline the two different avenues to becoming an SEWF Verified Social Enterprise. Later the blog will delve into the details of the process of SEWF Verification. Check back later to learn more.