SEWF2025: Reflections on ASEAN social procurement
I’ve been lucky enough to sit on the board of the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) for the past six years. Whilst a combination of Covid and being a new parent has limited my attendance to just two events in this time, the event in Taipei was a timely reminder of the incredible convening power of SEWF and the extent to which social enterprise is a truly global movement, with over 1000 participants from more than 65 countries.
The topic of social procurement has become increasingly prevalent at social enterprise events in the past 5-6 years. As someone who has been heavily involved in this topic for the past ten years it’s been great to watch it grow in the consciousness of the social enterprise sector at large as a topic of interest and importance. I often felt leaving these conversations however that our work in the UK was well ahead of most of our international peers and that the topic was being talked about rather than done in practice.
This is resolutely no longer the case. My big feeling upon leaving Taipei was that not only is social procurement now happening in all parts of the world (something we’d already identified in our State of Social Procurement report for World Economic Forum) but indeed the best practice, growth and ambition now rests elsewhere.
To take our hosts in Taiwan as an example, there is a coordinated approach from government, the private sector and social enterprise to drive social procurement activity. Driven from government through the Small and Medium Enterprise and Startup Administration (SMESA) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs there is the Buying Power Procurement Award, which recognizes buyers and suppliers through awards and public acknowledgment, encouraging collaboration and public-private partnerships. The impact is clear: cumulative procurement has reached NT$11.8 billion (c. £289m), with a record NT$4.1 billion (c. £100m) in 2025 alone. This growth curve is far faster than we’ve been able to achieve in the UK or Europe.
Perhaps the most impressive single example came from SK Group, South Korea’s second largest conglomerate (behind Samsung Group). SK have a Double Bottom Line (DBL) management framework to create simultaneous growth economic and social value, and see social enterprise engagement at the heart of this endeavour. Through their corporate foundation the Center for Social Value Enhancement Studies (CSES) they are investing in social enterprises, creating their own and finding ways to integrate them back into their wider supply chain.
What lessons can we learn in the UK and Europe? I think it’s clear that other markets are leapfrogging us in terms of the pace with which they’re developing social procurement. A critical factor in this is the ability to align ecosystem approaches around the central idea of buying from social enterprises. Rather than looking at this in isolation, places like Taiwan and South Korea are looking at the whole system, and how they can align government procurement (both policy and practice), investment, and private sector procurement to drive social enterprise growth. Whilst all these pieces exist in the UK for example, they remain more disparate – there is much work to be done and much to learn.
