Abstract
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has placed unprecedented pressure on governments, corporations, and civil society to close persistent gaps in poverty, inequality, health, and environmental stewardship. Public budgets and conventional market mechanisms have repeatedly proven insufficient to meet the scale of this ambition on their own. Social entrepreneurship, understood as the deliberate combination of entrepreneurial methods with a primary orientation toward social value creation, has emerged as one of the more promising instruments for closing this gap. This study examined how social entrepreneurship functions as a catalytic mechanism for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to establish the institutional and financial conditions that either enable or constrain this catalytic role. The central problem motivating the study is that existing scholarship on social entrepreneurship and the SDGs remained fragmented into isolated, single-country case accounts, leaving the cross-context mechanisms through which social enterprises translate innovation into measurable SDG progress under-theorized. Anchored on Social Entrepreneurship Theory and Stakeholder Theory, the study adopted a qualitative systematic literature review guided by the PRISMA 2020 protocol, drawing on secondary data from peer-reviewed journals, institutional reports, and policy documents published between 2015 and 2025. The reviewed evidence converges on seven of the seventeen SDGs, namely SDG1, SDG 2, SDG 4, SDG5, SDG 7,SDG 8, and SDG 10, with a major finding that social enterprises consistently and most strongly advance SDG 1, SDG 5, SDG 8, and SDG 10 through hybrid business models that convert social problems into investable opportunities, while this catalytic contribution remains concentrated among a narrow band of wellnetworked ventures rather than diffused across the wider social enterprise population.
Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainable Development Goals, Social Innovation, Impact Measurement, Blended Finance.
Author name(s):
Oladeji Johnson Olawale
Simiat Oluwatoyin Usman
Fatai Laide Rufai
Leonard Uchechukwu Agu
Oluwatoyin Olayinka Odobo
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23165619
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.