I have been to two not dissimilar global UN events. One was the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo. The other was the 1995 UN Conference on Women held in Beijing. Both times I was representing a UN organization, the World Health Organization. At the Cairo Conference, my first experience at such an event, I would have been lost had it not been for a well-weathered colleague from my organization who took me under her wing. She carried the official draft report of the ICPD document through the hallways clutched to her chest. I think she had memorized every word in the tome. The final document had 16 sections, and each is about five pages of single-spaced type.

I came to understand that the phrases in brackets in a UN Conference draft document were those with which one or more governments had found issue. The main purpose of UN Conferences is to negotiate the language in those brackets. UN technical agencies such as WHO attend the conferences to provide information to member governments about the technical accuracy and/or implications, in our case, for health, of the bracketed issues being debated. Our role is to dispassionately present the "factsî, neutrality being at a premium. I wondered how I would ever be neutral and dispassionate about women's reproductive health and reproductive rights. I was clearly not cut out for the job.

But in Cairo and again in Beijing, I trailed after my colleagues for 10 days. The Conferences lasted that long! Every day was like the previous one, highlighted only by passionate speeches from world leaders who were free to come and go with their respective entourages. But for the most part, we remained trapped in the rooms where the delegates debated the bracketed language in the document until consensus was reached. This went on often until the wee hours of the morning. There I sat, for hours, waiting in case anyone from any country had a technical question on health. I had not had so much fun since 10th grade English literature class when we dissected every word in Ulysses by James Joyce. It was actually a bit like watching cement set.

But, I was told, the entire process was worthwhile because activists all over the world would be able to wave the document that their respective governments had signed and hold them responsible for honoring the language to which they had agreed. Hmm....

In hindsight, I suppose I was too impatient with the process of never-ending intergovernmental consensus building, too convinced of the futility of it all, knowing that there was no way to ensure that governments signing the document lived up to their commitments. I was also frustrated by the overriding stress on the advocacy role for NGOs instead of one where NGOs were purveyors of concrete and feasible alternatives. In any case, it is no wonder that I now delight in working with social entrepreneurs. The sad irony is that while the community of social entrepreneurs has many hundreds of years of accumulated practical experience with solving current problems related to sustainable development, they are seldom given the platform to share with the world their methods and results so that others can emulate what they have done.

Worse still, those very actors, be they governments or representatives of business, that will be sitting around the table in Johannesburg next month to expound on their efforts to contribute to sustainable development, often impede social entrepreneurs in carrying out their innovative work.

My colleagues at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and I have just returned from weeks of travel to different parts of the world to carry out due diligence on our next round of candidates for the Schwab network of outstanding social entrepreneurs. What these individuals are doing is already difficult enough without artificial impediments, given their aim to innovate and achieve transformation for the social good. But governments and businesses sometimes kill or threaten the survival of the goose that lays the golden eggs of sustainable development. Let me provide just two current examples of social enterprises that have been contributing to sustainable development in the decade since the Rio Summit.

Javier Hurtado Mercado is a Bolivian social entrepreneur who in 1987 established Irupana, an enterprise that works directly with 1,700 indigenous farming families living in the Yungas region. Irupana focuses on buying and processing certified organically grown produce directly from those farmers, cutting out the middleman, and distributing those indigenous foods to Bolivian consumers. Hurtado started Irupana with US$4,000 and one product, toasted coffee (he says he is still the best coffee toaster in Bolivia). Today, Irupana produces and distributes 80 products including coffee, tea, bread, honey, marmalades, chocolate, dried fruits, a variety of cereals, granola bars, and dairy products to 18 Irupana stores and 300 outlets that stock Irupana products, as well as supermarkets in Bolivia's large cities. Approximately 4,000 customers a day buy Irupana's products. Organic goods sell at higher prices in local markets, as they are targeted to middle and upper income consumers, thereby allowing Irupana to pay prices to producers that are about 25 percent higher than those for non-organic produce. Moreover, Hurtado encourages the indigenous families with which he works to keep a portion of their produce for themselves, ensuring their improved nutrition and health. He employs knowledge of organic agriculture, as well as extremely high standards of production, to create a product that will command a price premium in local markets. Last year, Irupana's sales expanded by 32 percent, despite the economic situation in the region.

Hurtado's ultimate goal is to establish a new model of social enterprise financing for Bolivia, one where Irupana is owned by its factory workers and the farmers themselves, as well as other interested investors. Irupana is now attracting international buyers, and one European organic food buyer has signed a contract to buy 60 tons of Irupana's cereals every year for the next three years. I spent 4 days visiting Irupana, and trekked 40 kilometers up and back to the Andean community of Churubamba, 3,000 meters above sea level, where a community of 30 of the 1,700 Indian families live that supply Irupana. We slept two to a bed for those nights in one of the small huts in the village. Hurtado is clearly more than just a buyer. I was continuously struck by how he interacts with the farmers, both men and women. He explained carefully and clearly how they might improve their products, subtly guiding them to come up with their own answers. He is funny, smart and ultimately very humble. He gets involved in all aspects of their lives, not just farming, listens to them patiently, teases them affectionately, and they engage with him.

So what is the problem? Irupana, according to the government, is a business. Fair enough, so it is, but it is also performing vital social and environmental roles that government cannot play as effectively. Should it be taxed then at the same rate as, say, Carrefour, the French hypermarche that dominates the Bolivian market? According to the Bolivian tax system, it is no different . But, argues Hurtado, Irupana will be crushed if it has to pay conventional business taxes. What makes the issue more painful is the knowledge that the bigger and more powerful the enterprise, the greater the chances that it will find ways to minimize such taxes . Governments attending the UN Conference in Johannesburg might forward their global agenda, and save their budgets money, by reorienting their attention from treaties and wordy professions of ideals to the kinds of practical incentives regimes and supports that the world needs to foster, rather than impede, sound social enterprises such as Irupana.

Just next door, in Quito, Ecuador, another social entrepreneur, Maria Elena Ordoez, founded Arcandina (Andean arc) to create multi-media products targeted at children that are both entertaining and educational. In particular, Arcandina focuses on conveying practical messages on environmental conservation and the unique Latin American fauna and flora by using some of the main endangered species as muppet characters. Maria Elena and her colleagues are convinced that through Arcandina, they can empower a new generation that believes in its ability to effect positive environmental changes, altering the dangerously unsustainable course upon which we are currently embarked. This is not a crazy idea. Using me as a test case, and in just a few hours of exposure to Arcandina, I found myself as absorbed in its power to entertain and educate as any member of its target group, children between ages 7 and 14. Others seem to be similarly enchanted by the characters, the music, and the messages. Earlier this year, Arcandina was recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Award for "the most outstanding international production aimed at children."

Arcandina began in Quito in 1996, then went national. Between 1996 and 2000, Arcandina was transmitted nationally in Ecuador by Teleamazonas. Each program reached approximately 88,000 children. These youngsters gave it a 16/20 rating, and what was most unusual in Ecuador, the television station and Arcandina received approximately 8,400 requests over a 6 months period from children calling in about the episodes, and wanting more information about environmental issues.

But in 2000, Teleamazonas abruptly decided to drop Arcandina, despite its obvious success with its primary audience. According to one source, an Ecuadorian journalist, "Arcandina is no longer transmitted in this country because the values associated with environmental conservation are not considered to be commercially profitable". Today, Ecuadorian television for children is non-existent outside violent cartoons. Parents across the country vilify the medium but have not moved to change the situation. Ironically, while Teleamazonas let Arcandina fall through the cracks in 2000, Telemundo, a Latin American television production and distribution company, picked Arcandina as the one high quality children's program it wanted to buy for wide distribution in the Americas. Thus, while the Arcandina show stopped being aired in Ecuador, its programs have continued to be popular in several Latin American countries. It is the first Ecuadorian program that has been broadcast daily for more than two years in the United States and Puerto Rico.

I have provided just two current examples from Latin America but the experiences of social entrepreneurs everywhere from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Western Pacific are not dissimilar. Government and business representatives attending Johannesburg, and their counterparts elsewhere, might well reflect long and hard on how they might better support social entrepreneurial efforts like those of the Maria Elena Ordoezes and Javier Hurtados of the world, who work at the "bleeding edge" of the market for sustainable development. Experience in the 10 years since Rio makes abundantly clear to those on the ground the futility of focusing on macro and geopolitical issues and consensus building, while neglecting the home-grown realities in oneís own backyard that constrain citizen's efforts to offer viable alternatives to unsustainable development.

(Pamela Hartigan is Managing Director of The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in Geneva.)