SUCCESSFUL entrepreneurs can achieve rewards beyond their wildest dreams. Money, power and fame abound for the world’s top business figures, many of whom started from scratch. For some of them, however, riches are not enough.

Apart from hefty bank balances, billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson have another thing in common. They have all reinvented themselves as social entrepreneurs, using their business nous to tackle issues such as poverty and climate change.

Social entrepreneurship isn’t the preserve of the super wealthy, either. According to Social Entrepreneurs Ireland (SEI), a charitable foundation that aims to foster a socially conscious entrepreneurial spirit, a growing number of people here are using skills acquired in the commercial sector to set up small enterprises that make the world a better place instead of making profits.

Its members have done everything from setting up travellers’ theatre companies in Dublin to refitting a former dance hall in Buncrana in Donegal as a community arts and social centre.

“They are innovative, driven, committed and visionary — just like any other type of entrepreneur,” said Sean Coughlan, the SEI director. “But they aim for social profits rather than financial profits. The primary focus is on solving a social problem, such as poverty or unemployment.”

One such social entrepreneur is Cormac Lynch, the founder of Camara Education, which reconditions old computers and ships them off to needy schools in Africa. Lynch, who had been an investment banker for 12 years in London, New York and Moscow, jokes that he set up Camara to “atone for my sins” in the financial services sector.

“I asked myself the question, ‘What have I always wanted to do?’ I knew the answer was somehow to do some work to help Africa. I suppose it was more a guilt thing than anything else,” said Lynch.

After quitting his career, Lynch enrolled on a master’s degree in development studies at University College Dublin. While preparing his thesis on the role of technology in education, he travelled to Africa.

“When people over there heard what I was doing, they kept coming up to me and asking if I was able to get them any computers. Back in Dublin, I saw computers lying in skips, so I said I’d collect a few of them and ship them out. The more I got into it, the more I knew I needed volunteers who knew a lot more about computers than I did,” he said.

Lynch convinced a recruitment website to give him a free advertisement seeking help and he got more than 100 replies within a couple of days. He blagged the use of a free workshop — the back room of a Dublin pub — and took on a volunteer with expertise in computer science. Camara charges a €20 recycling fee.

“We started off taking them for free, but we got burnt when we took 30 one time, after being told by the company that they were in perfect working order, only to find that they were useless. We had to pay to get them recycled,” he said.

“It costs about €80 to get each computer from here to a desktop in Africa in working order, so the net cost is €60. Any money we have left over goes on shipping fees.”

Initially funding came from his own resources, as well as an exhibition of Ethiopian art, which raised enough money to cover the cost of a van to collect the computers. Lynch cold-called some of Ireland’s largest companies seeking their unwanted PCs, before wiping their hard drives clean and installing educational software.