Powering the just transition – The biggest opportunity for inclusive business
Next year, I will celebrate my 10th anniversary in the inclusive business community. Supporting the Asian Development Bank’s IB initiative in Manila in 2012, an amazing universe of thought leaders and pioneering companies, investors and policymakers opened up to me. Driven by the desire to achieve social impact beyond the single bottom line, they have […]
The role of social procurement for inclusive value chains
By definition, social procurement leverages the purchasing power of companies to achieve broader social impact objectives. It goes beyond responsible sourcing which integrates and manages ESG criteria into the procurement process. Instead, it focuses on buying goods, materials, or services from social businesses with the explicit intention to create net positive impact. Why is that […]
Let’s learn from local communities and step up more to create climate and social impact
Next month, the international community will gather at COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, to further accelerate global action towards climate change. The aim is to “to build back better, and greener”, states Alok Sharma, COP President. According to him, this is necessary because, like the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change is disrupting the global […]
Six Actions Businesses Can Take To Reduce Negative Impacts of Purchasing Practices on Human Rights
Companies’ purchasing practices can have a profound impact on human rights. Businesses are under mounting pressure to take responsibility for the wellbeing of the women and men working in their supply chains, with mandatory human rights due diligence legislation approved or underway in several countries. While Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability teams are working hard […]
How can business-led innovation support refugees?
We know that the humanitarian landscape is changing – crises have become more protracted and complex, as well as characterised by greater barriers to humanitarian assistance. The COVID-19 crisis and associated economic turbulence is also accelerating need. In this context, business has a role to play in developing a more sustainable response to global displacement and in […]
Since the pandemic, many businesses have accelerated their strategies towards greater social purpose.
AB InBev is the world’s largest brewer with a mission to “bring people together for a better world”. One might consider this to be smart marketing to sell beer, but they are also letting their purpose do the talking with the creation of the AB InBev Foundation, an independent non-profit that is helping to advance […]
How can companies contribute to growth that generates benefits for society as a whole?
One of the objectives that we pursue in our IV report is to create greater awareness of inequality and make poverty in our country more visible by making its different faces known: child poverty, energy poverty, or the so-called “poor with work,” people who, even with a permanent job, do not make ends meet. During […]
How Can Businesses Support Economic Inclusion for People in Extreme Poverty?
Before COVID-19, over 700 million people worldwide were living in extreme poverty. The pandemic could push an additional 150 million people into extreme poverty by the end of 2021. People experiencing extreme poverty already have limited access to health care, food, clean water, and public services. They face obstacles in accessing markets, employment opportunities, and […]
Inclusive businesses’ insights to staying resilient in times of crisis
Resilience is one of the widest used terms among the global business community in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. An innumerable number of toolkits and guidelines have been prepared by consulting firms and other organisations to support companies in assessing their level of preparedness to confront and survive the pandemic. However, as Ndidi Nwuneli of Sahel […]
Saving the lives of the rich and the urban poor through cross-subsidisation
LifeBank is a medical company based in Lagos, Nigeria. It uses data, technology and a smart logistics system to deliver blood and oxygen from labs across the country to patients and doctors in hospitals. LifeBank is also building a movement of 1 million voluntary blood donors to improve Nigeria’s blood supply. Since 2016, LifeBank has […]
Four lessons for businesses wanting to build more equitable supply chains through sustainable sourcing
Approximately 78 percent of the world’s poor, or 800 million people , live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for a living. Most of those smallholder farmers are operating at extremely low levels of productivity and are excluded from formal markets. Meanwhile, there is a growing demand for locally-sourced food, particularly in growing urban hubs […]
Evaluation gaps, challenges and implications: Responsible business initiatives for sustainable supply chains?
Internally, many companies are already innovating on sustainability to a greater or lesser degree. Some make strategic changes with respect to sustainability performance, but the competitive pressures of globalized value chains remain very strong. Hence, becoming more responsible is not a straightforward task for brands and retailers, especially those in mainstream and/or highly competitive markets, […]
Youth Perspectives on Our Future Economy
Demand for a new and sustainable economic model is reaching a new peak. As 2020 dawned, even committed advocates of globalised capitalism (like the IMF and World Economic Forum) have called for a rethink, in recognition of the looming threat of climate change and unconscionable levels of global inequality. In recent months, the world has […]
The post-COVID-19 world presents an opportunity for better business, but will it happen?
As COVID-19 wreaks havoc on lives and livelihoods around the world, fulfilling a social purpose has never been so important to businesses or their customers. The global outbreak has not only exposed the frailty and complexity of human needs, but also how quickly they can evolve – and thus how quickly organisations must adapt to […]
Early Insights From Four Practitioners in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis
This article is a follow-up to the webinar “Resilience for Inclusive Businesses – Early Insights from Practitioners” that took place on April 9, 2020. For the video recording, please click here. To be updated on future webinar installments, please check out the Hystra website or the Global Distributors Collective’s dedicated COVID resources page. As the […]
Inclusive Business Solutions to Poverty, Post COVID-19
While corporate philanthropy and development aid will be necessary for the short to medium term, the economic recovery agenda demands collective and coherent action from businesses, including corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If ever evidence was needed that inclusive business should be higher up the agenda, this is it. Inclusive business and COVID-19 […]
Put Collaboration at the Heart of Global Efforts to Re-build MSMEs Post COVID-19
The global pandemic has triggered an unprecedented surge of support for micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), both in recognition of the critical role they play in national economies and global value chains, and because of their vulnerability as global economic activity grinds to a halt. COVID-19 is making an already challenging environment for MSMEs […]
The Informal Economy is Complicating Government Responses to COVID-19: Will the Crisis Push Millions Toward Formality?
As COVID-19 spreads in countries around the world, governments have already started to address the economic and livelihood challenges posed by the constraints the pandemic has put on behavior and employment. Wealthier OECD countries are designing economic support measures to target the backbone of most economies – the tens of thousands to millions of small businesses. […]
Three Promises Lidl Has Made to Protect its Food Workers
But there is another group of frontline food workers doing the same, hidden from view, those who produce the products we are all trying to buy, such as tea, coffee, prawns, fruit and vegetables. Even before Coronavirus, Oxfam research highlighted workers’ vulnerability, earning low wages on insecure contracts, often with poor sick pay and hygiene arrangements. In 2018, we launched the Behind the […]
Vulnerable Workers in Global Value Chains – Ambitious Collaboration Needed
Global brands and large companies acted swiftly to stabilise cash flow and protect their staff in developed countries. Attention in the next part of the ‘respond and stabilise’ phase needs to shift rapidly and ambitiously to workers throughout the value chain. Damage has already been done, but much can still be done to mitigate the […]