Business Solutions for Smallholder Farmers in Africa
At last year’s G8 summit President Obama highlighted the need to invest in African agriculture, announcing a new initiative aimed at driving sustainable agricultural productivity. Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are the key to that initiative’s success. There are around 33 million smallholder farmers in the region, representing 80% of all farms and producing up […]
G8 Nutrition for Growth
UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke about the role of foreign aid in reducing poverty and malnutrition. Originally given at G8 Nutrition for Growth conference on Saturday, 8 June 2013. This is the text of the speech as drafted. There will be a lot of people talking about statistics today. I want to start by […]
Rice production in Cambodia: the poor farmer’s perspective
Rice farming in Cambodia can be a tough and uncertain business. Rainfall is highly erratic, both drought and floods being regular occurrences, land is often infertile or under-nourished and investment in new farming systems and technology is minimal. Yet approximately 60% of the Cambodian population rely on agriculture (mainly rice production) for their livelihoods and […]
MeraDoctor: Reaching Rural Households with Trusted Health Advice
MeraDoctor is providing reliable health advice over the phone in rural India, where licensed doctors are scarce. It has been a life-saving health intervention for many patients who have found that treatments prescribed by unqualified health agents—called “quacks” in India—are ineffectual, or even harmful. For example, one customer, a 26-year-old woman who was eight months […]
Building an architecture to drive Post-2015 collaboration
Achieving the post-2015 development agenda will require the use of partnership at an unprecedented scale. Here’re some key elements necessary to make that happen. Last week’s report from the High Level Panel on the post-2015 development, rightly puts cross-sectoral collaboration squarely at the heart of achieving sustainable development, and reiterates the vital role business can […]
The Tipping Point: How Japanese Firms Can Shape the Inclusive Business Landscape
It was an honor to represent the Business Call to Action (BCtA) at a high-level side event last week in Japan—at the 5th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD V). The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) hosted the event and supported Japan’s commitment and preparation for last week’s conference. JICA organized seminars on inclusive […]
SMEs: The Next Frontier in Financial Inclusion
How can we contribute to meaningful increases in emerging market GDP and jobs without getting in the way? By investing in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The Microfinance Information Exchange reports that SMEs make up over 60% of national GDP and account for over 70% of total employment in emerging market nations. SMEs are major […]
Registries for ALL – Redesigning Patient-Researcher Relationships with an Open-Source Database
Registries for ALL (Reg4ALL) is part of a movement to transform the relationships between health data, patients, and researchers. As “the world’s first ever participant-controlled, cross-disease registry for health and disease data,” the Reg4ALL platform enables patients to share their health data and connect with researchers who need participants for clinical trials. The platform is […]
The Hunger Alliance: Investing in Small-Scale Women Farmers
There’s already enough food in the world for everyone, but one person in eight goes hungry every night, and 2.3 million children die needlessly each year from malnutrition. What can be done about it? A report published by the Hunger Alliance suggests investing more in small-scale women farmers would be a good start. Three quarters […]
Improving Access to Oral Healthcare: A Robust Business Model for a Self-Sustaining Nonprofit
Sarrell Dental is arguably the only highly successful, self-sustaining non-profit dental practice in the nation. It has accomplished what many in the U.S. health industry had thought impossible—providing dental care to children covered by Medicaid, while running a top-notch, growing business and lowering the cost of care to the government. Sarrell Dental works in the […]
Empowering Women through Business
How does any institution, private or public, achieve scale when targeting an emerging area of business interest such as supporting women entrepreneurs? This was the key question during the conversation I participated in, hosted by Coca-Cola and Business Fights Poverty, on the margins of the Africa World Economic Forum in Cape Town last month. The […]
Business Incubation in Ghana
Mabel Simpson is the creative director of her own design house, mSimps. It’s a prestigious job for a young woman in Ghana. “At mSimps we make hand-made hand bags, clutch purses, men’s slippers, laptop sleeves,” she says proudly. “All mSimps bags are one-offs. Two people do not own the same bag. Our designs are inspired […]
Trending in Social Innovation: Questions for the Founder and Curator of the Social Innovation Summit
From a presentation of a prototype for the world’s first cardboard bicycle to a conversation with “Mr. Toilet,” this year’s Social Innovation Summit, held May 29 and 30 in New York City, spanned the gamut of inventiveness and cross-sectoral approaches to systemic societal challenges. For four years now, the summit (held annually in New York […]
A WaterFirst Health Model – Delivering Healthcare in Emerging Markets
HealthPoint Services’ “WaterFirst” sells inexpensive, clean water to prevent water-borne illnesses in remote communities in India. But villagers who visit HealthPoint units to buy water get a lot more: they can also purchase health commodities like sanitary pads, condoms, and nutritional supplements for pregnant women. Villagers can also access health services like vaccinations and diagnostic […]
Beyond income: Understanding the BoP from an access to development perspective
No matter how much practitioners agree on quantifying the Base Of the Pyramid (BOP) based on their access to development and basic needs, we still seem to be loosing the battle against income threshold fundamentalists. Beyond the traditional controversies calculating purchasing power parity (PPP) income measurements, due in part to the lack of comparable basket […]
Radically redefining the role of business in a post 2015 world – the need for symbiotic partnerships for development
Despite much talk about the importance of business in the post 2015 development framework, astonishingly little agreement seems to have been reached on the question of how, in practice, the private sector should be involved in the post 2015 development agenda. And unfortunately, the report of the High Level Panel, which came out last week, […]
GSK & Save the Children Partnership: From Ambition to Action
The High Level Panel on the post-2015 development framework submitted its report yesterday (Thursday 30 May), giving the first indications of the settlement that will replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire two years from now. The debate has featured discussions on everything from plankton abundance to WiFi access, but one issue that stands […]
Challenging Kenyan Agribusiness to Bring More Nutritious Foods to Local Markets
Following the World Health Assembly’s 66th annual meeting in Geneva last week, one prominent question should be on every participant’s mind: “Is what we are eating contributing to a healthy world?” As leaders and families especially in poor countries struggle to ensure there is a meal on the table, we should not lose sight of […]
Supporting Small Shopkeepers in El Salvador
One way in which economic and social progress can be advanced in Latin America is through modernising and strengthening small and micro enterprises across the region. Small and micro businesses are critical to economic growth; they play an entrepreneurial role in meeting the needs of local consumers and larger businesses, drive improvements in innovation and […]
Sustainable Food Production – A 21st Century Revolution
I grew up on a small farm, living on less than a dollar a day per person. I was lucky—we had a big garden, an orchard, raised some of our own meat, and hunted and fished for most of the rest. Years later, I worked with refugees and famine victims, seeing firsthand the impacts of […]