SEI — Social Entrepreneurship Index
Social Entrepreneurship Index · SEI 2026About
Social Entrepreneurship Observatory · SENIC

SEI 2026

The Social Entrepreneurship Index measures the conditions 45 European countries offer social enterprises across five dimensions, drawn as the SEI Diamond.

v0.9
Provisional edition

What the index is

The SEI asks whether a country’s political, economic, legal, institutional and financial environment makes it easier or harder to start, run and grow an enterprise whose primary aim is social or environmental. It measures conditions, not the size of the sector. The full index has 63 indicators drawn from three kinds of evidence: public statistics and published indices, a review of laws, strategies and programmes, and a survey of social entrepreneurs and ecosystem experts. The methodology note explains how the scores are built; the open data are free to reuse.

The edition

SEI 2026 is named for the year of publication. It describes the policy framework at the end of 2025 and uses statistics up to 2024 or 2025. The current release, version 0.9, scores the 40 indicators that public data and policy documents can fill for all 45 countries. Version 1.0 adds the survey indicators for the first pilot countries and launches at the Social Entrepreneurship Conference (SECon) in Skopje in 2027. Each later edition, SEI 2027 onwards, updates the policy coding and the statistics on the same goalposts, so that change from year to year can be read directly.

Release notes

VersionDateChanges
0.9.4Indicative scores for countries beyond Europe.
  • Countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa are scored on the same indicators, method and goalposts as the 45, with their policy criteria coded and re-checked against public sources.
  • They are indicative and not ranked with the 45; the scores of the 45 are unchanged.
  • A Beyond Europe page with a profile for each country, and their scores and policy criteria as new files in the open dataset.
0.9.3Criteria-based policy coding.
  • Each of the eight policy indicators is now the mean of its criteria, each answered on four levels against a written description, in place of the earlier codes on two to four levels.
  • The evidence and the public source for every answer are shown on the country pages and listed in a new policy-criteria file in the open dataset.
  • Low-confidence answers were re-checked against public sources before release, and a sample of countries was coded twice independently; the agreement is reported in the methodology note.
  • Most composites and ranks change; the methodology note’s version history gives the largest changes.
  • What changed and why: the reasons for the change, how the answers were checked, the author rulings and the effect on the scores.
0.9.24 November 2026Public sources for every policy code.
  • Every EU policy code is now documented with public documents (laws, strategies, programmes, procurement rules, official and cross-country reviews), so none rests on the non-public SEAP country reports alone; 24 codes received their first public source.
  • Five codes corrected by author ruling where the public record contradicted the country report: social clauses in public procurement in Hungary and Italy, EU funds and institutions in Italy, the official definition in Germany. The composites of Germany, Hungary and Italy change.
  • The methodology note adds the origins and conceptual basis of the index, with references.
  • Interface in Spanish, French and Italian.
  • Explorer: the country panel scrolls beside the map and the ranking, with a country selector and collapsible sections; the Kosovo designation footnote on every page.
0.9.13 November 2026First public provisional edition.
  • The provisional SEI Diamond for 45 countries from 40 live indicators, with composite and dimension ranks.
  • The SE policy and legal framework layer at end-2025: 26 EU member states coded from the SEAP mid-term review country reports, 19 countries desk-coded on the same rubric.
  • The governance layer on the 2025 revision of the Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2013–2024.
  • The Diamond recomputed for every year from 2015 to 2024 on fixed goalposts.
  • A weighting switch and sensitivity tests (policy at half weight, without policy coding).
  • One-page country profiles, share links and an embeddable widget.
  • Interface in Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian (Latin): navigation, explorer controls, country and indicator names, country profiles and the widget. The methodology note and data pages remain in English.
  • The open dataset (CSV and JSON, Frictionless data package) and the methodology note, prepared for deposit with a DOI.
Known issuesv0.9
  • Each country’s latest value is used whatever its age, so a few values date from 2014 to 2018. Version 1.0 will set a maximum age.
  • The EU-funds indicator scores EFTA countries and the UK at zero, largely because they are not eligible.
  • Liechtenstein, Kosovo and Belarus are scored on fewer than 27 of the 40 indicators.
  • The policy layer has been double-coded for a sample of countries only (methodology note, section 6).
Pilot2020The full SEI Diamond, including the survey indicators, for North Macedonia, with trend data for 2014–2019.

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