The Role Banks Can Play in Advancing Gender Equality
BFP: Credit Suisse is this year’s host of Business Fights Poverty’s flagship event at UNGA in New York – could you tell us a little more about why a bank like Credit Suisse supports these kinds of initiatives? PD: At Credit Suisse, we believe that it is in the interest of both our organization and […]
Future-Gazing Business Models: How One Company Uses Impact Measurement to Tackle Youth Unemployment
Impact champions such as India’s Empower Pragati are turning the impact measurement field around. Rather than defining impact based on past activities, they are using ongoing business activities to guide how they chart the course for the future Unemployment is a country-wide issue in India, and the nation’s youth are hardest hit. A staggering one […]
Bringing the Lessons of Clean Sanitation Home
Banka BioLoo, which produces environmentally-friendly bio-toilets, looks to the communities where its products are present to measure how they’re improving lives by raising hygiene and sanitation standards in children’s schools Having access to clean toilets is not just a basic human right – it’s also a health necessity. But in India, nearly 50 million people[1] […]
Inclusive Business – Make or Buy?
Investing externally has become a real opportunity for Corporates now. More than a decade of innovation has brought forth hundreds of commercially viable companies that reach low-income communities as consumers, producers, employees or entrepreneurs. Many of them are ready for growth. Pairing up with a large company can marry the best of both worlds: agility […]
From Suicidal Depression to Social Entrepreneur: Creating a New $bn Industry for Rural Africa
15 years ago I was working in the London advertising industry, promoting products I didn’t believe in for clients who didn’t appreciate it. I ended up asking myself ‘What am I doing with my life?’ The lack of a sense of true purpose and meaning in my life lead me into a downward spiral and, […]
Raising the Purpose Banner (Again) is Only the Start
It’s great to see my partners @MartinJenkins and their clients in New Zealand making strides forwards (see here). It is progress when communications and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) teams unite under the purpose banner*. But to deliver sustainable success for all it is critical that Executive Teams and their Board’s grasp the initiative and hot-wire purpose into […]
The Fix Up: Campaigning for the Right Reasons – Marketing Campaigns vs “Advocacy” Campaigns
I’m on a mission to harness the power of brands to add genuine value to societal progress, whether that be social or environmental. Why? We’re facing unprecedented times – a climate and environment emergency has been declared, displacement is a threat for more and more communities, civil space is increasingly restrictive, regressive girls’ and women’s […]
How Can Businesses Unlock the Potential of Social Intrapreneurs?
Building on the “The Intrapreneurship Ecosystem: Creating the conditions for social innovation to flourish in your company,” a business guide produced by Business Fights Poverty and The League of Intrapreneurs (LOI) with support from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), CEMEX, and the BMW Foundation, we recently held two online discussions. A panel of […]
How Businesses Can Help Achieve the SDGs for Refugees
The SDGs were launched, to great fanfare, as a blueprint for achieving a better and more sustainable future for everyone. As states signed up to the Global Goals in 2015 they pledged to leave no-one behind and prioritise the fast-tracking of action for those with furthest to go. Yet four years on, research shows that […]
New Fund to Address Social Isolation Through Technology Closing Soon
Social isolation is a major public health concern, affecting people of many backgrounds, ages, locations and socio-economic circumstances. Research has shown that this issue can be linked to poor physical and mental health as well as potentially negative effects on communities. And those effects are felt most by those communities affected by additional challenges such […]
How Can Business Advance Gender Equality Across the Value Chain by Engaging Men as Allies?
Men have a critical role to play in achieving gender equality. What is less clear is what this might mean in practice for organisations in their approach to advance gender equality. A new Business Fights Poverty Challenge will explore how businesses and organisations are advancing gender equality within their organizations and across the value chain […]
Not Just a Women’s Issue
What are some of the causes and consequences of violence against women? What role do men play? How can men unite to ensure the world is safer for everyone: women and girls, men and boys? In the inaugural presentation of the Clayman Institute’s 18-month symposium on breaking the culture of sexual assault, noted educator, author […]
Managing Human Rights Risks: Embracing a More Robust Approach to Human Rights Risks in Supply Chains
Oxfam will lead a panel at Business Fights Poverty Oxford 2019 on its supermarket campaign, Behind the Barcodes, giving a platform to two influential supermarkets as well as perspectives from consumers, investors and a multi-stakeholder initiative on ethical trade. The top six UK supermarkets have already responded to the campaign. As more consumers and investors […]
How Harnessing Technology is Modernising Informal Retail in Emerging Markets to Deliver Social Impact
More than 61% of the world’s employed population – two billion people – earn their livelihoods in the informal sector, with 93% of the world’s informal employment occurring in emerging and developing countries. 86% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa is informal and 80% of household retail is delivered via informal retailers. Yet informal retailers face […]
PREVIEW #BFPOXFORD Connection Lunch: Oxford Researchers Look to Tackle Multidimensional Poverty with Social Enterprise sOPHIa Oxford
OPHI is a research and policy center at the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. It created the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which is a way of measuring poverty in all its dimensions. Poverty everywhere in the world is measured by income. But income is not a good proxy for poverty. […]
Business Fights Poverty Oxford 2019 Connection Zone Lunch: Transcending Conflict to Fight Poverty
“Seventy-three percent of people in the societies of the bottom billion have recently been through a civil war or are still in one,” said Professor Collier in The Bottom Billion. Conflict is “pretty distinctive,” he says, to the poorest countries on the planet. In these countries conflict tends to be a pattern, often prolonged. In […]
PREVIEW #BFPOXFORD: Capitalism Needs You – As a Smart Influencer
I am sceptical of capitalism as it stands; anyone who had to blow the whistle on a boss for fraud will be, but I still believe that it’s the best system available to make the world work. Why? Because I believe it’s an effective system that’s being hijacked by a few really badly chosen incentives […]
The Improv Intrapreneur: How Learning to Let Go Could Offer Important Lessons for the Intrapreneurship Movement
It was only on leaving Accenture in 2016 that I realised how defined I’d become by my role. It’s an issue that affects many of us in business. I had to discover who I was, as opposed to what I did for a living. Since then, I’ve gone to task on the promises I made […]
PREVIEW #BFPOXFORD Keynote Profile: Monique Ntumngia, Winner of the Visa Everywhere Initiative
“But Madam, we do not have lights; how are we going to be able to study at night? “When we go into the bushes to search for firewood for cooking, we usually get raped. Madam, we need this to stop.” Aminata, the leader of a group of Muslim girls, presented these questions to my team […]
Purpose Goes Hungry Without Culture
Business Fights Poverty is currently asking: “How can we embed Purpose authentically into business.” But what can this look like in practice, and where do we go from here? First, the Purpose has to be worth embedding! In other words, it has to be inspiring and convincingly explain how the business creates value for itself […]