Social Entrepreneurship and It’s Role towards Poverty Reduction: A Comparative Study between Indonesia and Thailand Context

--- Social Entrepreneurship (SE) is believed as one of the ideal solutions to reduce the number of unemployment and poverty. Some prior studies suggest that SE may leads to significant changes in the social, political, and economic contexts for poor and marginalized groups.This research aims to examine and analyze SE in Indonesia and Thailand context. The main purpose of the research is to find out whether local social enterprises can become drivers of poverty reduction in the region. More specific, the research questions of this study are: 1) How is SE evolved in the region?; 2) What are the internal and external factors that drive the raise of SE in the region?; and 3) How does SE benefit for local people and poverty reduction?. The target population of this research involves SE in Indonesia and Thailand. The study design was a multiple case study. The study provides a comparative analysis of 6 cases of SE in each country. The results showed there are differences with regard to the emergence and development of SE in Indonesia with SE in Thailand. The study also found there are number of internal and external factors that pushed the raise of SE in the region. Finally, the results also showed that the SE provides many benefits to local community, among others in the form of employment, increased prosperity and increased quality of life of the local people .