Not Oprah’s Book Club: How to Change the World

So I’ve been reading this book called How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein and I’m finding myself perpetually vacillating between “That’s amazing!” and “Wait a minute…” Let me explain.
Bornstein, an extremely thorough journalist, decides that he’ll travel around the world and profile “social entrepreneurs” connected to the Ashoka Foundation, starting with the founder of Ashoka himself, Bill Drayton. I first heard about this idea of “social entrepreneurship” a few years ago at an NYU conference, and my interest was immediately piqued. At that time I was feeling especially depressed about the state of the world and my capacity to do anything about it.
Here’s the definition, in part, provided on Ashoka’s site:

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

So on to the confusion. Sometimes I see these entrepreneurial projects as mind-blowingly amazing. They often abandon the old charity model (third world poor need wealthy western help) and instead embrace the idea that those in community know what their community needs and how to get it–they just need help getting the resources in the right places at the right times. For example, I just read a profile of Jeroo Billimoria, the founder of Childline, a 24-hour helpline and emergency response system for children in trouble–completely run by children! Totally frickin’ amazing. Jeroo basically had the wisdom to fund and formalize what street children in India were already doing–sharing resources and looking out for one another.
This works for me entirely, but other profiles seem to operate on the idea that poor people just need to be turned into “a market” and then they will uplift themselves. It’s a little like the boot strap ideology with a patronizing altruistic twist. We can’t just give malaria nets away; we have to sell them so that people will be incentivized to take them seriously.
So the way to “save the world” is to import more capitalism? What about a systemic analysis of our economies and the ways in which they fail so many people? Is this a little like importing democracy? We’ve seen how wise that turned out to be.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Will someone help me out here?
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