This article originally appeared on Skoll.

Echoing Green provides seed funding and technical assistance to emerging social entrepreneurs. Over the last few years we’ve seen a significant increase in innovative enterprises making social change through for-profit business models. This year, 45 percent of applicants to our social entrepreneurship Fellowship program proposed for-profit and hybrid business models, a 30 percent increase since 2006.

When looking at trends in this applicant pool, we noticed more than a third of the applications proposed work in Africa, and more than half of those were for-profit and hybrid organizations. Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria were among the top five countries of focus for the third year in a row.

From last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kenya to the upcoming Skoll World Forum, international attention and energy is focused on entrepreneurship in Africa. Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria are becoming social innovation hubs—with social entrepreneurs connecting, innovating new business models, and learning from each other. And increasingly they are using for-profit or hybrid structures to achieve their impact…

To read the rest of this article by By Min Pease, please click here.