The founder of three of the four companies that make up Oshun SA is Varkey George. Varkey George was born in Kerala, India but has spent most of his adult life in various parts of South Africa.
He has been recognised as one of the leading practitioners of Social Entrepreneurship in the social sector by the Schwab Foundation. He has had various experiences in rural and urban South Africa, having set up various job-creation, education projects and transforming non profits from total dependence to greater financial independence.
In 2000, he was appointed as the CEO of the Wits Rural Facility of the University of Witwatersrand where he turned around a financially ailing organisation to be sustainable. While in that position he was elected as the founder chair of the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve.
In 2004, he was appointed as the CEO of SHAWCO (Students’ Health and Welfare Centres Organisation), at the University of Cape Town, where again he was tasked to turn around an ailing organisation which is now trail blazing in the practice of social entrepreneurship. While there, he developed and implemented various initiatives that doubled the budget, as well and implemented initiatives whereby more than 50% of the budget was self generated.
His speciality is to identify a social issue that needs to be solved, and adopt solutions with passion, connecting the necessary skills, technology and finances to find unique and sustainable solutions.
In 2012, he decided to open up a consulting company called Multiple Income Generating Strategies for Non Profits (MIGS). The company is a think tank for social entrepreneurship, runs a consultancy to assist non-profits become sustainable and runs academic courses for visiting students from abroad.
Varkey has also developed a series of lectures on Social Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship and Emotional Intelligence. He has been visiting lecturer at the University of Cape Town, Gordon Institute of Business Science, Pretoria, USB, Euromed and Ieseg School of Business in Paris and Lille and the Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Students from Norway, Sweden, Germany and the USA come to Cape Town to study social entrepreneurship and conduct research with him.
He has been appointed as special advisor and external evaluator of three European Union projects in South Africa. In 2019 he was invited to run a workshop to create an internationalisation strategy for a department at Karlstad University, Sweden. He has been instrumental in submitting another 1 million Euro proposal to the European Commission in 2019 to improve Higher Education in South Africa. In the same year, he built a Kindergarten in a township using crowd funding by Karlstad Nursing Free Mover students to raise funds.
