DURING a community-service expedition to Cambodia two years ago, Singapore Management University (SMU) student Eugene Yeo and his course-mates were taken aback by how poor the rural folk were.
Instead of just giving them food rations or used clothing, the young Singaporeans started thinking about how to help these villagers support themselves in the long run.
Back here, the team of four Singaporean and three Cambodian SMU students decided on their own to do this by setting up a cookie business that would train and hire workers from the provinces.
A year later, Camory, a cookie boutique and cafe, opened in the capital of Phnom Penh to sell traditional favourites alongside chocolate chip cookies and shortbread.
Every month, the cafe sells about 80,000 cookies made by 10 villagers, who now have jobs and steady incomes.
Mr Yeo, 25 and in his third year in business management studies, and Ms Liu Meiju, 22 and a fourth-year social sciences student, have taken a year off school for the business. They manage the operations in Phnom Penh.
The rest of the team members market the products here.
Social enterprises like theirs are catching on among students here, said National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School's Associate Professor Albert Teo.
'There is a lot of scepticism over the charity model and people are wary about just giving money away,' he said.
Social enterprises have therefore sprung up to create jobs for poor communities to make them more self-reliant.
The students, in turn, get a chance to apply the skills they have learnt in the real world.
To encourage more students to take on such projects, the NUS Business School recently set up a centre for social entrepreneurship and philanthropy.
It will offer courses in social entrepreneurship and involve students in community development. The centre will also run management programmes for non-profit groups and social enterprises.
Over at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, a new diploma programme in business and social enterprise was started in March to meet the growing demand for professionals in this area.
Students in the three-year programme are taught business fundamentals, crisis management and business law.
Not all social enterprise projects undertaken by students involve travel overseas.
A dozen NUS business students, for example, are working with the Patient Care Centre at Tan Tock Seng Hospital for their final-year project.
They are helping the centre to come up with a better plan to develop, package and market gift items made by HIV patients.
Ms Jasmine Chong, a 22-year-old third-year business administration student, said her team aims to bring in $20,000 in yearly revenue for the centre through the sale of these items, which include cellphone charms, ribbon flowers and festive ornaments.
Ms Aveline Tan, 19, a first-year economics undergraduate at SMU, said: 'We are young, so we think that everything we come up with will work. This experience will teach us to be flexible in order to cope with change.'
She went with a group to Dali in China's Yunnan province to help boost business at a cafe that employs the hearing-impaired.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Jun 16, 2008
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