The British Council, supported by United Nations ESCAP, in collaboration with HSBC and Social Enterprise UK, has collected data since 2017 together to produce a comprehensive, comparative social enterprise landscape report across South East Asia. The report covers studies conducted in Hong Kong, China; Indonesia; Malaysia; the Philippines; Singapore; Thailand and Viet Nam.

Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG) launched new digital policy resource with tools, recommendations and best practices for enabling policy environment for impact investment in Asia and the Pacific.

Vietnam’s economy has radically transformed over the past few decades. Despite this, Vietnam continues to grapple with social challenges such as poverty, unequal access to public health and education and the need for environmental sustainability.

Social enterprises are businesses with a social mission, set up to address these challenges. In the past decade, interest in social enterprise and social entrepreneurship has grown significantly in Vietnam, not only among budding entrepreneurs, but also among non-governmental organisations, policy makers, funders and academics.

This issue paper is being written with the overarching objective of informing the policy makers at the federal and provincial-level regarding the facilitation required by social enterprises in Pakistan. The British Council, SDPI and partners have conducted past research on the policy environment under which social enterprises work across the country (SDPI 2016 and Richardson 2017).