Waste Not Want Not: £240m on Unwanted Christmas Gifts
People in Britain will waste more than £240 million* on unwanted presents this Christmas with one in four people saying they panic buy presents, according to a survey commissioned by micro loan website lendwithcare.org. With each ‘panic buying’ adult spending an average of £46.25 on wasted gifts and almost three quarters of buyers (75%) unable […]
Inclusive Business as a Tool for Development in Morocco
The National Initiative for Human Development (NIHD)[1] in Morocco promotes inclusive business as an important tool for development. Four factors seem to be especially crucial for the NIHD’s success as an inclusive business policy: Its high visibility as an overarching policy framework, its participatory approach, its collaborative governance and its clear implementation responsibilities. The National […]
Stop Britain Wasting more than £240m on Unwanted Christmas Gifts Says Microloan Site lendwithcare.org
People in Britain will waste more than £240 million* on unwanted presents this Christmas with one in four people saying they panic buy presents, according to a survey commissioned by micro loan website lendwithcare.org. With each ‘panic buying’ adult spending an average of £46.25 on wasted gifts and almost three quarters of buyers (75%) unable […]
What Can We Learn from Inclusive Business Start-Ups?
There is clear potential for business to fight poverty, but it’s not an easy journey for entrepreneurs trying to start a business that can benefit poor people. The high risk and uncertainty both in the markets and in the business models makes it difficult to find the capital necessary to turn ideas from concepts into […]
Bringing ‘Smart Insurance’ to India´s Poor
Anjali Devi has come a long way from her home in rural Punjab to the public hospital in Mohali, the capital of the district. The three hour bus ride to the hospital has led her and her husband get up early in the morning to make sure that they can make it back home the […]
Amanda Bowman: Clinton Global Initiative’s Top Five Trends in Employee Engagement
Wow. New York was busy last week. Capitalising on the UN General Assembly meetings, many other organisations took the opportunity to bring people together to forward their agendas. IBLF was involved with several events – the UN Private Sector Forum, The Global Business Coalition on Health, a Business Call to Action private breakfast, the UN […]
4 Success Factors for an Inclusive Financial Sector
The potential of Inclusive business models to contribute to poverty eradication and sustainable development is well known – and is increasingly gaining attention among governments and policymakers in general. But many inclusive businesses are facing constraints, hindering them to reach a larger scale. They typically include a lack of information, rules, financial resources, and structure […]
“It´s Inclusive Business, stupid”
Of course, we do not know if Bill Clinton, provided he would run for president today, would frame his presidential campaign like this. But what we know is that today governments and donors would do good in promoting inclusive business and they have a number of policy options at hand to do so – as […]
Financial Inclusion and the Financial Sector Deepening Initiative (FSD) in Kenya
The potential of Inclusive business models to contribute to poverty eradication and sustainable development is well known – and is increasingly gaining attention among governments and policymakers in general. But many inclusive businesses are facing constraints, hindering them to reach a larger scale. They typically include a lack of information, rules, financial resources, and structure […]
Learning From Companies, Sourcing From Smallholders
A sustainable supply chain that sources from smallholder farmers – sounds easy. But it is common knowledge that long-standing problems like insufficient quantity and quality, side-selling of the harvest, rainfall, pests and prices, can often beset initiatives in practice. Two candid new case studies depict the innovative attempts of two businesses to set up smallholder […]
Investing in Agriculture in the DRC
Since the launch of CDC’s current strategy in 2012, our aim has been to invest where our job creation focus can have the greatest impact: in countries where the private sector is weak and jobs are scarce, and in sectors where growth leads to jobs. Our recently announced US$18.1m investment into Feronia, an agricultural production […]
The Self-Sufficient School – A Proposal for Quality Education
Fundación Paraguaya In many emerging countries, young people face similar situations in terms of education. Overall, it makes little difference to vulnerable members of society whether they complete secondary education or not. If they drop out of education at an early stage, they can find some kind of subsistence activity to help them to earn […]
ESG Integral to Approach of Emerging Market Fund Managers
CDC Group plc, the UK’s development finance institution and a leading emerging markets private equity fund investor, has announced the results of its first environmental, social and governance (ESG) survey of fund managers. The survey looks at fund managers’ evolving ESG support needs and the ways CDC can meet this current demand. Fifty-three individuals took […]
Creating Lasting Change Through Public Private Partnerships
Swisscontact promotes economic, social and environmental sustainability by supporting people to develop the skills they need to contribute to local commercial life. For over fifty years, we’ve found that people possessing relevant market skills are those who have the greatest capacity to succeed in, and help transform, local economies. As an organisation we’re best known […]
Disrupted: The Future INGO
“Some of the routine service activities that INGOs have historically implemented–health care, food delivery –can now be carried out by local operators at a lower cost. The question now is: What do we bring to the picture that others cannot?” —Carolyn Woo, CEO, Catholic Relief Services Today’s international NGOs or INGOs stand at an important […]
Local Bank Financing for Smallholder Farmers
Over two billion of the world’s poorest people live in households that depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. The 450 million smallholder farmers within that group are a linchpin to global poverty-reduction. Yet most smallholders lack access to finance, holding them back from producing larger crop yields of higher quality to propel both economic growth […]
81 Pro-Poor Health Innovations
From her light-flooded office in central Mumbai, Sweta Mangal oversees a fast-growing emergency transport company. In the last year, Ziqitza Healthcare Limited nearly doubled the number of ambulances it operates from 460 to more than 850. Many of these ambulances respond to emergency calls across three states through the government-funded hotline Dial 108. The Center […]
HOW-TO BOLDLY AND BRAVELY BET ON YOURSELF
To describe itself to itself and to attract new converts, it is common these days for the nonprofit sector to talk in terms of investment – obscuring the legal and legitimate lines between grants and donations versus opportunities to make money by doing good (often called impact investing). Equally confusing, both financial investments and social […]
Education: An Untapped Investment Opportunity?
My mother was an English teacher. My Father an art teacher. My sister is a modern languages teacher. One could say that the ABCs are my DNA. Yet I opted for a career in business – not education. I chose to pursue the lure of success in the private sector over service in the public […]
Growing Changemaking Communities In Your Company
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the power of entourage. Not the Hollywood bros kind, not the rapper’s crew, but the often invisible communities of support that exist behind every great person. What I’ve come to notice is that the most successful social entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs have masterfully gone about creating communities of support for their […]