Author: Webmaster Business Fights Poverty

How Brazil’s Tenda Atacado Serves the Base of the Pyramid

Executive Director, VoxCred S/A The Tenda Atacado Group has 19 cash & carry stores in São Paulo, Brazil. By the end of 2013, we’re projecting revenues for U$900 million. Every month, we serve 1.3 million clients in our stores, 25 per cent of whom are entrepreneurs representing 50 per cent of our sales. We understood […]

Tea Companies See Returns After Investing in Worker Empowerment

CARE International has written about the business case for empowering women producers before; but the financial justification for inclusive business goes much further than that. This week, CARE International published “A Different Cup of Tea: The Business Case for Empowering Workers in the Sri Lankan Tea Sector” which demonstrates that companies investing in one worker […]

Celebrating Successful Impact Investment in South Africa

Enterprise Development is at the core of SABMiller’s long-term Sustainable Development strategy, helping create jobs and develop entrepreneurial skills in poor communities around the world. Encouraging Enterprise Development is a key SABMiller sustainable development priority – and well integrated into day-to-day business – for it is enterprise-driven innovation that can act as a change-maker for […]

Health Franchising: Strengthening India’s Village-Level Private Providers

India is often portrayed as a rising “economic tiger,” yet many of India’s one billion+ inhabitants still live on the margin; approximately 30% live below the poverty line[i], and 70% live in rural areas[ii]. Communities in these remote, rural areas lack access to basic health care, and despite the existence of pro-poor government-mandated schemes the […]

Building Infrastructure for Under-Served Markets

Finalist for Youth Business International’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 Award In just three years, Sharad Tandale has created a successful infrastructure engineering company employing 175 people and providing a range of services to meet the huge demand in the neglected and underserved small towns and rural areas of India. Sharad’s business, Innovation Engineers […]

Achieving Scale

Scale is the single biggest unmet challenge in development and impact investment today. IDE, the development organization I founded, has helped some 20 million people living on a $1/day move out of poverty, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.7 billion people still living on less than $2/day. About the […]

The Future is Yours

Every day, when watching the news, we see pictures of famine and floods, droughts and demonstrations, confronting us with the effects of increasing resource scarcity, climate change, food security, civil unrest and poverty. We see the increasing numbers of people left behind. Many wonder how on earth we are going to address all these challenges. […]

Building Schools & Delivering Quality Education in China

Interview with Huaping Yang, Finalist for Youth Business International’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 Award Spirited entrepreneur Huaping Yang has overcome failure to launch an education business which today enables hundreds of students to work towards achieving their goals. Chinese company Chengdu Aosite Education (AST) is a three-pronged after-school tutoring chain for students of […]

Building Schools & Delivering Quality Education in China

Interview with Huaping Yang, Finalist for Youth Business International’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 Award Spirited entrepreneur Huaping Yang has overcome failure to launch an education business which today enables hundreds of students to work towards achieving their goals. Chinese company Chengdu Aosite Education (AST) is a three-pronged after-school tutoring chain for students of […]

Tax, Transparency and a Large Step Forward…

In the autumn, Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, has a very important decision to make about whether to allow the public to know who controls 2.5 million companies in the UK, via a new public registry of beneficial ownership. Some might consider it a difficult decision but actually the […]

Forging a Sustainable Future in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka’s Northern Jaffna District, a region ravaged by 30 years of war and unrest, Prinson Thuraiaiya’s unique brass foundry business (producing castings from waste metal) encompasses entrepreneurial spirit, sustainability and a positive social mission. This is Prinson’s story…. I was born into a poor family. I keenly engaged in school education hoping to […]

Is Your Organisation Fit to Partner?

Solving today’s complex sustainable development challenges requires multi-sector collaboration and an all-of-society approach. However, whilst such shared value partnerships (simultaneously achieving business and societal benefits) are often hailed as “the answer,” practitioners can find them challenging and at times frustrating. One of the most widespread hidden barriers is a lack of internal institutional capacity for […]

The Business Case for Scaling Up Nutrition: Seizing the Moment

The huge political momentum generated this year has elevated the involvement of business in scaling up nutrition towards the top of the global development agenda. Arguably, there’s never been a better time for business to scale up its efforts to combat undernutrition. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement has just welcomed the 41st country to […]

Half the Sky: Change the Way We Talk About Women and Gender Equality

On September 4th 2013, the Women Advancing Microfinance (WAM UK) and Women in Social Finance networks are co-hosting the UK screening of the highly acclaimed documentary Half the Sky. We want to share this landmark film with the change-making Business Fights Poverty community as Half the Sky is a breakthrough on how the world thinks […]

Building an Affordable Learning Market

By Katelyn Donnelly, Executive Director, PALF and Ravi Patel, Analyst, Affordable Learning Fund As we approach 2015, it is clear that the international community will not meet its commitment to universal primary education (MDG goals). As of 2011, UNESCO estimated 57 million children of primary school age were still not enrolled in school. Additionally, 69 […]

The 3 Most Common Misconceptions About Business and Human Rights

Human rights remains a topic that companies may reference perfunctorily in their codes of conduct, but few really seem to understand. In their defence, this is in part because, first, best practice standards on business and human rights are often nascent at best, and, second, human rights tend to expressed in a nearly impenetrable mass […]

A Sri-Lankan Coconut Entrepreneur’s Story of Success

An Interview with Nimali Gunawardana, Nimali Chips and Fibre Mill, Sri Lanka Nimali Gunawardana (25) and her business, Nimali Chips and Fibre Mill, have been hailed as pioneers. Within a year she has created an environmentally-friendly enterprise producing and exporting coir for mattresses and coir piths and, more uniquely, making coconut husk chips which is […]

Good News Network Zambia

When I told my elderly neighbour in Ireland recently that I was returning to visit Malawi, her response was: “Oh! Isn’t it terrible out there, the poor little guys, you see them on the telly, little babies with flies in their eyes, all sick and skinny and everything”. I can’t blame her. What she knows […]