The social economy focuses on the employment and competence enhancement of people with a distance from the labor market. This target group is characterized by a greatly increased risk of poverty, an overrepresentation of people over 55, under educated people, people coming from a non-EU country, and persons with an illness, chronic condition or disability. For that reason, people think that social economy employment is a lever in the fight against poverty, but that is not always easy to measure. The report formulates 5 observations: The social economy

• employs a very vulnerable target group
• has a direct impact on the poverty risk of target workers.
• improves the context and living conditions of the target workers
• gives opportunities to those who get few opportunities elsewhere
• has great potential but reducing poverty requires great effort

Based on these observations, it formulates 5 recommendations:

• Reenforcing the embedding of social economy enterprises in local networks of assistance.
• Increase the potential of social economy enterprises by providing information sessions on taxes, premiums, etc.
• Identify and share the many inspiring efforts and "extra benefits" for target group employees within the social economy sector.
• More support, especially for organizing an internal flow of workers and "poverty-sensitive," work and implementing experiential knowledge.
• Increased cooperation and dialogue between businesses, umbrella organizations and government to identify structural problems that prevent employment from being a sustainable route against poverty

The study clearly identified the positive short-term effect of employment in the Flemish social economy on the poverty risk and social exclusion of target group workers. An important question remains what the long-term effects are in terms of both flow into normal employment market and poverty risk in other life domains in which exclusion is experienced.