Taking Risks to Break New Ground in Botswana
I was born with an entrepreneurial spirit. It all began when I started plaiting the hair of women in my community as a girl, including teachers at my school for a small fee. I would take the income home to help my family. I grew up in Botswana, in a small old town with my […]
Cambodia: Growing Momentum for Sanitation
By KC Koch, iDE WASH Communications Manager On a Sunday morning, rural villagers gather in the village meetinghouse. A respected member of the local commune committee calls for the group’s attention. She leads them in games and stimulates lively conversations about proper sanitation. People wave fans in the air decorated with colorful photographs and consult […]
How Giving Half Can Disrupt Nonprofit Economics
that gives half of its work away for free. Non-profit organizations are spending billions upon billions of dollars each year on fees billed by service-providers. While expenditures for services like marketing and design grow each year, funding declines. In fact, in 2013, there were 62 billion dollars in cuts from federal funding for non-profit organizations. […]
Two Types of Inclusive Business
How does one break down and analyse an inclusive business portfolio as large and diverse as Business Call to Action’s? The 94 BCtA member companies that have set up inclusive business initiatives range from global corporate conglomerates set up many decades ago, to early-stage social enterprises operating in just one area. So when it came […]
Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Rashid is a farmer I met in the Marangu region around Kilimanjaro, like his father and grandfather as well as the thousands of other farmers in the region he farms coffee, bananas and a variety of other vegetables. With declining crop prices, the income he earns from these crops is negligible and most of his […]
Scaling Corporate Social Enterprise in Latin America
Support for social entrepreneurship has grown rapidly in the last decade, and individuals seeking to launch new social enterprises now have a variety of options for networking, support for converting an idea into a tangible venture, and raising funds. But, despite these advances, social enterprises rarely have the opportunity to scale operations and, thus, impact. […]
Vegetable Seeds – Growth in Nutrition and the Economy
At the wholesale market in Arusha, Tanzania, it’s all about tomatoes. Everywhere you look, there are stacks of wooden crates piled high with the crimson orbs, ready to be packed onto trucks and driven off to the capital, Dar es Salaam, for distribution throughout the region. The thriving tomato trade is among the most visible […]
Challenging Assumptions Start-ups Can’t Reach Scale
Can start-ups scale? Can social enterprises reach sufficient millions of people to really crack problems of poverty? This question has been around for many years. Now first answers are emerging. A crop of ‘breakthrough’ social enterprises are emerging. They are growing fast, securing investment and partners, and reaching millions of people. Of course they do […]
Enabling Frameworks for Social and Green Enterprises
Over the last four years SEED has hosted a series of unique multi-stakeholder for a focussed on the Green Economy and Africa – the SEED Symposia – where each year innovative and promising start-up enterprises, that won a SEED Award for their remarkable efforts to address social and environmental challenges at the grassroots, are presented. […]
How a New Breed of Multinationals Can Root Out Poverty
The number of people now living on $2 a day or less is greater than the world’s total population in 1950, when the global fight against poverty began. Only business can marshal the resources (human and financial) and the incentives (profits and wages) to address this tragic reality at scale, and sustain the effort for […]
Why is Intrapreneurship Worth the Effort?
The last in our series of short insights from The Intrapreneur Lab, is Damian Payiatakis, Director of Strategic Development at Barclays Wealth, Lab participant in the 2013 Lab and invited back as faculty 1 year later. We interviewed Damian back in October 2013. The Intrapreneur Lab: What challenges lie ahead for you and your project? […]
Why Intrapreneurship is Gaining Momentum
As part of the series of short insights from faculty members of the Intrapreneur Lab, we spoke last October to Adrian Ristow, Special Projects Director at Coca-Cola and lead on Project Last Mile. The Intrapreneur Lab: Why is intrapreneurship gaining momentum? Adrian: An intrapreneur is someone who is trying to drive some type of change […]
The Power of Intrapreneurship
As part of the series of short insights from faculty members of the Intrapreneur Lab, we spoke to Anuradha Bajaj, who at the time was acting head of the Private Sector Department at the Department for International Development and mentor at The Intrapreneur Lab. The Intrapreneur Lab: What’s your view of intrapreneurship? Anuradha: I think […]
The Qualities of a Successful Intrapreneur
As part of the series of short insights from faculty members of the Intrapreneur Lab, we spoke to Professor David Grayson CBE, Director of Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Cranfield School of Management. The Intrapreneur Lab: ‘What is an Intrapreneur’? David: Well I think social intrapreneurs are people working inside large businesses who develop ideas, […]
Lessons for Aspiring Intrapreneurs
The past 12–months have been a whirlwind of growth for The Intrapreneur Lab – the accelerator programme for social innovations inside large companies conceived by Leadership Laboratories, Accenture and Business Fight Poverty and now held in business schools across the world. The pace of growth is to us a clear indicator that intrapreneurship is a […]
Emerge 2014 – Living with Purpose, and Other Highlights
Great minds from all reaches of the social entrepreneurship realm came together at Said Business School this weekend for an intensive, 2-day conference to discuss some of the arena’s most pressing insights, developments and issues. Lead by Oxford’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, in conjunction with Student Hubs, this year’s Emerge Conference saw several major […]
A Call for Smarter Giving and a Harmony Among Donors
It was Albert Einstein who once said that insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He could well have been talking about today’s technology-for-development (ICT4D) community, which has a habit of trying the same things over and over again in the hope that someone might eventually get it […]
Financing for Humanitarian Action
Monika Vrsanska/CAFOD Visioning the Future: Future Humanitarian Financing is bringing together experts from Business and Private Sector to explore new approaches to meet the financial costs of responding to crises such as the Pakistan Floods. CAFOD, World Vision and the Food and Agriculture Organization have been tasked by the Inter-Agency Standing Team in Geneva to […]
We Need to Talk About Toilets
You visit the toilet about six to eight times a day on average 2,500 times a year. This amounts to three years of your life spent sitting on a toilet. If you are lucky. If you are not one of the two and a half billion people in the world unable to access adequate sanitation. […]
Closing the Information Gap on Impact Investment
Information, as they say, is power. Nowhere is this truer than in business and finance. Most new business ventures will involve an element of risk or a leap of faith. However, the better calculated that risk, or the more accurately measured the leap, the better the chance of success. Which is why, the Impact Programme, […]