Building and scaling social enterprise business models for BoP markets in Kenya

Over the last two decades, research on Base of the Pyramid (BoP) business strategies has proliferated, mirroring rapid developments in practice. Nevertheless, there remain gaps in our understanding, with extant BoP literature skewed to focus on multinational enterprises. Wider actors working in and with the BoP, including social enterprises, have received less scholarly attention. In particular, few works have focused on BoP social enterprises in Africa. This chapter contributes to addressing these limitations by examining social enterprises in Kenya and their building and scaling of business models for BoP markets. It does this by drawing upon empirical case study research with 12 social enterprises in Kenya. This chapter sheds light on how BoP social enterprises build their business models, how they scale them, the challenges they face in doing so, and how these challenges are overcome. It contributes to the BoP and social entrepreneurship literature, as well as providing important insights for practice.