Question

Sasibai Kimis left a successful career in finance to start the award-winning social enterprise, Earth Heir in 2013. Earth Heir began with an appreciation for craftspeople and to empower them to achieve sustainable livelihoods. Each piece of craft exemplifies distinctive, personal and cultural narratives and whilst dedicated to the creation and preservation of heritage crafts, it also focuses on sustainability as 10% of revenue is reinvested into the development of artisans, reforestation and animal conservation. In 2015, Earth Heir won the British Council and Arthur Guinness Projects Social Enterprise Award and Sasibai was an Eisenhower Fellow in the Women’s Leadership Program focusing on socio-entrepreneurship issues and preserving heritage craftsmanship skills.

1- Discuss about her mission, benefir and the mechansim of her business (200 words)

2- What are the challengers, risks and orstacles she faced ? (150 words)

Answer 1

Answer 1:

SasiBai is a social entrepreneur who started Earth Heir in 2013 in Malaysia after quitting his successful career in the finance sector and that was the biggest game-changer in her life. Social enterprise refers to a business organization that tries to solve social and community issues with the help of a profit or non-profit business entity. The main objective of social enterprise is to maximize the profit of society and solving specific social issues and helps in benefiting the environment as well.

The mission of Earth Heir: The mission and objective of the Earth Heir to provide sustainable livelihood and empowerment of Craftspeople by providing them a platform to sell their arts to the world.

Benefits: Sasibai Kimis is providing benefits and monetary empowerment to artisans and craft people with her social Enterprise Earth Heir. Earth Heir also provides advisory services to its artisans and craft people in designing, production, finance, etc. Earth Heir is also reinvesting it 10% of revenue in artisans development, plantation and animal welfare.

Mechanism of the Earth Heir: Earth Heir is an online platform in e-commerce form that provides various handicraft items made by many artisans in Malaysia. Earth helps in marketing and promoting ethnic craft prepared by around 100+ artisans. Anyone can buy the product listed on Earth Heir and the artisans will get their money from the Earth Heir after deducting their platform fees. Earth Heir is committed to reinvesting some of the amounts from its profit in forestations and animal welfare.

Answer 2.

Earth Heir - Challenges, Risks, and Obstacles faced by SasiBai Kimis:

Sasibai completed her education in Singapore and came back to Malaysia to create some changes in her own country. She started Earth Heir, which is a social enterprise. We know that starting a business is very tough and starting a social enterprise is even tougher. In starting years, Sasibai Kimis was developing a network of artisans and identifying what were the issues with artisans and craftspeople. But it was very tough to see the result in her initial years of struggling. It was the time where she felt so depressed because she was the only one who was working in Earth Heir and was not getting any salary. But in 2015, she won the British council social enterprise award which provides Sasibai a new hope toward her business. And from the money earned from the award, she rented out her first official studio in 2016 and the company started growing towards success.

And after that, she did not look behind and increased the network with artisans and her company was helping them in product designing, setting prices and keep uniqueness in their products. Today more than 500+ craftspeople got benefitted from Earth Heir and this number is continuously growing in terms of revenue, technical business, and happiness on craftspeople's faces.