Free to be free?

I’ve been thinking about services and social entrepreneurship and all sorts of good things about making money in such a way that the public as a whole benefits.
And really, that is what entrepreneurship (“social” or otherwise) is about – finding some way that makes things better for some set of customers.  And in many cases, it is about making things free (or virtually so), sometimes by having someone else pay for the service (e.g Google with AdWords, or even Aravind Eye Hospital). It goes to say that “free” does not always mean free.  Sometimes we pay with our time/attention, our screen real estate (remember when we all got free Internet from
juno.com), or even just a counter increment on a web site.  I think freerice.com just wants to build awareness about hunger and poverty while making us learn SAT vocabulary. Well, plus whatever other ulterior motives they may have.  On top of that there’s all sorts of issues about what it means to give people something for nothing. I once went to a Taiwanese youth camp that was originally fully subsidized by the Taiwanese government, but later started imposing a nominal fee because parents thought the experience couldn’t be valuable if they didn’t have to pay for it. Likewise, some of the Mallapuram residents expressed that they didn’t want to go to the Akshaya kiosks because they were perceived as social enterprises for poor people. I think it is some of these issues that make it so difficult to work in Africa. The years of development aid have created 1) an expectation that if they wait long enough someone will come and offer what they need for free (or for a  world bank loan, which is not strictly free but often perceived as such) or 2) cynicism on the part of residents because so many offered “free” projects have quickly evaporated after considerably time and effort on their parts.  For me this manifests itself in the general trend that a lot of my work (e.g. getting things through customs) has simply failed to progress unless I was physically present. Eventually you can achieve momentum, especially if by continuing to come back you dismantle some of the cynicism by building some level of trust.  But it goes to say that our projects have a better chance of being sustainable if we acknowledge up front the investment we expect from them (time, money, etc) in return for what we are supposedly giving them for “free”.