Hello everybody,

two friends of mine and me are about to start up a social enterprise in Cape Town, active in the field of socio-economic community development. Currently we try to figure out which legal structure would be best for this venture and I hope to find some advice in this forum. For clarification: A social enterprise is about social impact maximisation while being financially self-sustaining from its operations.

The facts: The legal structure will be an international one. For several reasons there will be a german non-profit organisation acting as an umbrella organisation for the South African organisation. The german NPO shall amongst others make Euro donations available to our South African organisation, which therefore has to be a non-profit organisation. Yet, that is where the problem starts. Our business and social impact model requires us to interact with SMMEs, Mobile Network Operators and Mobile Payment Service Providers, which for reasons of credibility, confidence and trust requires us to run a normal For-Profit organisation. This means, we are looking for kind of a hybrid legal structure ensuring us the business credibility on the one side and the NPO status to ensure our social impact maximisation goal (which would qualify us for donations etc.). So far, we think about setting up a South African NPO which administers all profits from our For-Profit enterprise, but we do not have the expertise to figure this out all by ourselves. Therefore I would appreciate it very much if you could help me out with some advice on which legal structure would suit us best.

Thanks a lot in advance!