Top 10 Blogs of 2014
It’s been another incredibly active year on Business Fights Poverty with over 600 stories featured on our homepage. We are proud of the fact that 95% of our content is produced by members. By sharing your insights, you are helping inspire and inform a global movement of people passionate about harnessing business to fight poverty. […]
How to Increase Investment In Micro-Enterprises
This month CARE submitted written evidence to the International Development Committee (IDC) of the House of Commons on our peer-to-peer lending network, Lendwithcare.org . The IDC is currently looking at jobs and livelihoods and is interested to understand more about the role that a relatively new way of funding micro-enterprises can play in generating growth […]
A Unique Way of Investing in Small Family Businesses
Interview with Composer Christopher Gunning, Lendwithcare Supporter It’s no secret that Christmas, traditionally associated with goodwill and generosity, has over the years become a festival of gluttony and excess. Waste, too, is slowly creeping up: this year an estimated £2.4billion will be spent on unwanted gifts in Britain alone. Charity gifts are on the rise […]
Joanna Lumley Highlights the Value of Lending
A charity supporter who recognised the power of animation, social media and digital story telling was so inspired by crowdfunding microloans site lendwithcare.org that he decided to fund a short film himself to help spread the word about the site. As an entrepreneur himself, Julian Bashford fell in love with the simplicity of the revolutionary […]
Giving The Gift Of Opportunity This Christmas
When crowdfunding is combined with microfinance, amazing things can happen. Jo Broughton of Lendwithcare, the peer-to-peer microfinancing platform devised by aid and development charity CARE International, says that in the fight against poverty this is a winning combination. Lendwithcare began in 2010, offering individuals in the UK the chance to club together to finance the […]
Fighting Climate Change With Indigenous Livelihoods
edia Manager, Ashoka Changemakers In Indonesia, where forests are being destroyed at the highest rates in the world, an untapped solution exists for balancing conservation with economic expansion. Indonesia is the world’s fastest deforester—a dubious distinction that once belonged to Brazil. A recent reportrevealed that more than 2 million acres of primary forest are cleared […]
How Inclusive Business is Transforming Tourism
In 2012, 1 billion tourists travelled across borders, compared to 25 million in 1950. Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide, and it’s growing most quickly in emerging and developing countries. Currently, UNWTO calculates that tourism is responsible for 9% of global GDP, for over 1 in 11 jobs and for USD 1.3 […]
Communicating Sustainable & Inclusive Growth
As 2014 comes to an end, companies are beginning to reflect on their achievements from the past year and are already planning for their 2015 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. CSR reports have become the norm among Fortune Global 500 corporations to communicate about successes and challenges associated with reaching sustainable and inclusive growth goals. […]
Communicating Sustainable & Inclusive Growth
As 2014 comes to an end, companies are beginning to reflect on their achievements from the past year and are already planning for their 2015 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. CSR reports have become the norm among Fortune Global 500 corporations to communicate about successes and challenges associated with reaching sustainable and inclusive growth goals. […]
Insights on Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise
On November 20 and 21 in Santiago, Chile, leaders and experts from the corporate, government, academic, consulting, civil society, and impact investing worlds came together for an engaging discussion on scaling corporate social enterprise. The Inter-American Development Bank believes such enterprises offer huge potential as sustainable drivers of development, growth, and job creation. But, like […]
Giving Through Consumption
The weakest in Africa are predominantly rural and constitute approximately 70% of the population. They are often forced out of their habitat to give way to large scale investments only to return to their ancestral lands as cheap labour earning wages that are barely sufficient for their basic needs. They go hungry in presumed resource […]
A New Programme to Bring out Innovation and Change
Do you remember some of your most productive learning moments as an adult? They likely involved solving problems that were relevant to your life or working environment, and in an informal atmosphere. Learning moments in the inclusive business field are no exception. I vividly remember some “accelerated” learning experiences like arriving in Rwanda with what […]
How to Create a Transformative Business Model
On 2 December 2014, the Business Call to Action (BCtA), in partnership with the Business Fights Poverty (BFP), hosted a webinar discussion addressing the question, How Do You Create a Transformative Business Model? During the webinar we discussed challenges and opportunities that companies face in developing, sustaining and scaling successful inclusive business models that achieve […]
Closing the Early-Stage Financing Gap for Entrepreneurs
Picture your favorite startup company operating in the developing world. It might be selling solar lanterns to off-grid communities, providing transportation services for agricultural commodities, or perhaps operating a chain of grocery stores. Regardless of its sector or location, like any startup it probably did not follow a direct path to scale and success. It […]
How will you Step Forward in 2015?
Friday 5 December marks International Volunteer Day and to coincide with this, VSO is launching a new global campaign inviting people to pledge to #StepForward and raise the profile of volunteering for development in 2015. This campaign builds on recent research conducted by VSO and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) demonstrating that ‘human-capital’ is […]
How to Integrate Social Entrepreneurs within Corporate Value Chains
Increasingly, corporations want to work with social entrepreneurs to secure their supply chain, demonstrate their commitment to inclusive business, and strengthen trust and brand in the communities in which they operate. Social entrepreneurs are seeking to partner with corporations seeing them as first customers paving the path to scale, ever elusive in the world of […]
Unlocking Equity For Early-Stage Entrepreneurs
Is it possible to invest equity in African early-stage companies in a sustainable manner? Has anyone ever invested equity and provided support to early-stage companies in West Africa in a sustainable manner for amounts as low as EUR 50,000? Why not and why is it so hard? Another way to see this question is to […]
Economically Empowering Women at Scale in South Africa
Ngoetsana Sehlabo is known by her community in Orange Farm, South Africa as Mampho. For many years she was a hawker, on the streets selling a local dish called ‘atcha’. In 2012, she branched out and set up her own store – Mampho’s Fast Food – to sell food, drinks and snacks. After a year, […]
Women's Economic Empowerment Key to Alleviating Poverty
Around the globe, women and girls make up 70 percent of the 1.5 billion people living on less than a dollar a day, and the key to addressing this issue begins with their economic empowerment. Business ownership is a powerful vehicle for women to build more assets, but, perhaps more importantly, investing in women yields […]
IFC’s New Report on Inclusive Business
About 4.5 billion people in developing countries are low-income, living on $81 a day or less. They are the so-called base of the economic pyramid and constitute a $5 trillion consumer market. However, the success of local businesses has often been lost in the discussion of ‘BOP business’ to date. While case studies abound on […]