Eyes in the Sky: How Drones and Satellites Can Transform African Agriculture
Across Africa, millions of smallholder farmers employ hard work and limited resources to coax their harvests from the ground. It’s a challenge for many of these farmers, because they often lack the information necessary to determine how to most effectively use their resources. But what if every farmer knew exactly what each of her plants needed—the […]
Exploring Last-Mile Distribution and BoP Marketing
In the second article, introducing you to the experts and topics we’ll be exploring during our Business Fights Poverty, flagship conference in Oxford on 18th July, we introduce you to inclusive distribution, brought to you by BoPInc (& Every1Mobile), Hystra, and Practical Action. Founding members of the Global Distributors Collective (a partnership-based model that acts […]
Why Cash Is a Problem For Businesses Around The Globe
Until very recently, bags of cash were dropped by plane, every 15 days, in remote rural areas of Uganda to pay more than 8,000 workers on tea estate plantations. When the cash arrived, workers waited half a day in line to collect their wages and the company had to deploy nearly a hundred staff members […]
Child Labour in Cocoa: Why It’s So Hard to Combat and What We’re Doing About It
60% of child labour is in the agricultural sector. That’s a staggering fact made only more concerning when you learn that in West Africa, where 70% of the world’s cocoa is sourced, 2.1 million children work in cocoa fields. This is an issue which agribusinesses like Olam – along with our peers, customers, NGOs, and international […]
Brand Purpose – How Social Impact & Shared Values Win Customer Love
2017 – The death of marketing In 2012 the US PR and marketing consultancy, Edelman predicted that ‘purpose’ would be the re-engineering of brand marketing. Looks like they were right: in 2017, the online marketing platform CMO proposed that it’s now time to admit that traditional marketing is dead. That brands with real purpose and meaning are already winning the […]
Partnerships with Innovation and Impact
On 18th July our flagship Business Fights Poverty Oxford conference takes place. With over 300 key stakeholders from business, NGOs, academia and public policy, this interactive day will explore how to enhance business with positive social impact, through collaboration and building trusted relationships, whilst learning from others and sharing ideas. Click here to apply for […]
How Can We Engage SMEs Exporting to Frontier Markets With the Case for Doing Business With Integrity?
Bribery and corruption are major barriers to global trade and investment. 43% of compliance officers of UK firms indicated that they had decided not to do business in a country due to the perceived risk of corruption. And at the firm level, the evidence shows that the disadvantages of bribery outweigh the benefits over the […]
Boosting On-Site Sanitation in Urban Kenya and Nigeria: Four Consumer Realities
Mary Anyango, a 34-year-old resident of the Korogocho slums in Nairobi, works in a food processing company as a packer, earning 88 USD a month. After late hours at work, she returns to the 10 x 12 feet one-bedroom home that she shares with her husband and three children. The house sits on a compound […]
Interview with Alexander Bernstein: Leonard Bernstein’s Revolution
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein’s role as a larger-than–life figure is well-documented, especially in this year of celebration for the one hundred-year anniversary of his birth. Questions remain as to what one can learn from his music, […]
Interview with Jerry White, CEO of Global Impact Strategies, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia
Jerry is the CEO of Global Impact Strategies, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia, and co-chair of Global Covenant Partners. Jerry is known for leading high-impact campaigns including the historic International Campaign to Ban Landmines which was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1997. He also co-founded Survivor Corps, formerly […]
Connecting Music to Ethics
Many features of music contribute to its positive potential for promoting social harmony. But music’s influence on human interaction is not entirely benign. I consider features of music that enable it to serve such contrary projects. I begin by itemizing some of the mechanisms through which music creates feeling of solidarity among people. Among them […]
Empathy: A Global Imperative for Peace
This essay maintains that interplays between empathy, goodwill and other-regarding behaviors can make a huge difference in arguing one type of community into existence (one based on inclusivity, peace, respect, and universal human values) as opposed to arguing another kind of community into existence (one based on turmoil, meanness, wretchedness, genocide, and heaps of trouble). […]
Professionalising African Motorcycle Taxis: From Vitamins to Painkillers
SafeMotos is proud to announce the new version of our smartphone application: what we believe to be the most localized piece of software ever built by an African startup. It’s been a rocky journey though, with many missteps along the way. Our hope is that we can pass on some of the lessons learned at SafeMotos so others […]
Investing In The Energy Transition
Innovators and entrepreneurs are working to speed up the transition towards clean and renewable energy sources, but many of the innovative clean energy projects have trouble raising the finance to turn their ideas into reality. This was the case for ATEC, a social enterprise in Cambodia which has developed appropriate technology to address the health […]
Advocating Together to Promote the Value of Overseas Development Assistance
Last year, when Congress was considering the FY 18 budget, the new US administration proposed significant funding cuts to US overseas development assistance, the State Department and the United Nations. If enacted, the cuts would have had a significant impact on US aid programmes supporting food and nutrition security, human rights and labour protections in […]
Care Work Matters: Advocating for Greater Recognition of Unpaid Care and Domestic Work
In some parts of the world, women and girls currently spend as many as six hours each day on unpaid care and domestic work, which includes tasks like laundry, cooking, cleaning, collecting water and caring for dependants. Despite its vital contribution to families and communities, unpaid care and domestic work often goes un-recognised. It affects […]
Advocating Together for the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights
Long gone are the days when companies and NGOS could barely talk to each other. NGO-private sector partnerships are now the order of the day, and governments increasingly hope that companies will help in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from poverty reduction to climate change. But joint advocacy between companies and NGOs is still […]
Advocating Together for Universal Health Coverage
In a world where at least half of the world’s population cannot obtain essential health services, achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) – the idea that everybody in the world should be able to access the healthcare they need without fear of financial hardship – has become a critical building block for Save the Children and […]
The Business Case for a Gender Audit
An increasing number of businesses have committed to create more diverse, gender-balanced, inclusive workplaces – recognizing that it is not only the right thing to do, but also makes business sense. This recognition of the value of gender equality is progress in itself – but pursuing change in this area is not simple, particularly for […]
Joint Civil Society – Business Advocacy Is Emerging as a Powerful Tool to Drive Policy Change in Support of the SDGs
Nearly three years after formally adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is increasingly clear that governments face significant challenges that could undermine progress. These include fiscal constraints, lack of political will, institutional failures and state fragility. Moreover, governments are always under pressure to deliver short-term results, but many of the complex systemic challenges being […]