For her Disruptor Interviews Series, June O’Sullivan, the Early Years Entrepreneur, interviews Servane, the CEO of Ogunte, a social business that has been amplifying the Women’s Social Entrepreneurship ecosystem since the early 2000s.
June O’Sullivan: What was your main motivation to carve your organisation with a social conscience?
Servane: There was no specific motivation; it just happened.
I grew up in Brittany, France, in a politically conscious family of left-wing social workers, teachers, artists, educators, people from the land. Many of them involved in the community and entrepreneurial by spirit, although not business owners. I left home to work abroad, studying for a Dutch masters through distant learning – there was no Internet then – which is not the usual pathway to developing a social business. As a young person, I had had some vague wish to become a journalist. To me, it meant participating in helping people to learn and understand their context from different perspectives but also challenging them to see and understand other worlds and connecting them with each other.
