Sharon D’Agostino: Looking Past the Data to See the Face of Motherhood
Often, people committed to global health are surrounded by statistics – and it can be easy for numbers to lose their meaning. Our work on maternal and child health issues has shown me staggering gaps in the quality of life for women and children around the world, but even I sometimes have trouble putting data […]
Making Broadband Accessible For All
Blog by Matthew Kirk, Group External Affairs Director, Vodafone Group and Steve Bratt, Chief Executive Officer, World Wide Web Foundation, about the twelfth in the Series of Policy Papers, launched on 19 May 2011, from the Vodafone Socio-Economic Impact of Mobile (SIM) Advisory Panel. To download the report, click here. Most governments rightly see getting […]
“Cracking the Code” on Access to new Housing for the BoP in Latin America
Post by Susan Olsen, Lead Specialist, Opportunities for the Majority Initiative, Inter-American Development Bank We know markets often fail the poor. The “Opportunities for the Majority” Initiative (OMJ) of the IDB seeks to develop and promote market-based solutions to help solve the market failures that prevent the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) from accessing quality […]
Joe Phelan and Olive Boles: 10 ways to engage the private sector in health
Investing in the health of women and children is not only the right thing to do, it also builds stable, peaceful and productive societies. It reduces poverty, stimulates economic growth, is cost-effective and crucially, helps women and children realise their fundamental human rights. In September last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched “Every Woman […]
The GIM Initiative Releases 60 New Case Studies of Inclusive Business Models
The “Growing Inclusive Markets” (GIM) Initiative, a UNDP-led global multi-stakeholder research and advocacy initiative on inclusive business models (i.e. financially sustainable models that include the poor on the demand side as clients and customers, and on the supply side as employees, producers and business owners along the value chain), has recently released 60 new case […]
Free Resource Guide on Inclusive Business
This week Business Action for Africa and its partners are hosting a series of events in Cape Town focusing on the important connections between business and development in Africa. The first of these will look at “inclusive business models” that expand access to goods, services and jobs amongst low-income communities through company value chains, with […]
Announcing Next Billion's New E-book: THE Big IDEA: Global Spread of Affordable Housing
About a year ago, NextBillion teamed up with one of our Content Partners, Ashoka, for a Twitter chat. Our mission: Unearth the overlapping challenges and the market solutions to affordable housing for the world’s low-income consumers and producers. We were soon buried in data. The discussion was lively, and as much as we tried to […]
Announcing Next Billion’s New E-book: THE Big IDEA: Global Spread of Affordable Housing
About a year ago, NextBillion teamed up with one of our Content Partners, Ashoka, for a Twitter chat. Our mission: Unearth the overlapping challenges and the market solutions to affordable housing for the world’s low-income consumers and producers. We were soon buried in data. The discussion was lively, and as much as we tried to […]
Joe Phelan: India’s difficulty with being good
For the past two weeks, I’ve been working with Apeejay Surrendra – a privately owned Indian conglomerate – to launch their new India Volunteer Awards. “The purpose is to encourage volunteering and volunteer engaging organisations – corporate and NGO – across India,” says Shalab Sahai, founder of iVolunteer, a partner in the awards. Multinational companies […]
Jessica Scholl: To Divest or Not to Divest? – Doing Business in High-Risk Zones
As events rapidly unfold in the Arab World, the plight of business has been woefully under-reported. Companies with operations or investments in the region are finding themselves embroiled in morally, and often times legally, ambiguous situations. Political uncertainty further complicates the scenario, often requiring different policies to address unique circumstances. From the relatively peaceful to […]
Working Collaboratively to Propel Entrepreneurship: ANDE Two Years On
Alleviating global poverty is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today. Despite the progress of the international community to find solutions to help end poverty, it continues to persist. Many will agree that there ought to be more innovative ways of helping the world’s poor beyond providing aid, which has proven in many […]
Clare Melford: Inspired Leadership – Towards a Sustainable World
The number of Americans who believe that the free market economy is the best economic system is in free fall, a recent poll from GlobeScan shows. Tracking opinions from 2002 and across 25 countries, the poll shows that many emerging economies now surpass the USA in feeling positive about the free market system! Americans rated […]
Brook Horowitz: Corporate Culture that Has Less Vertical Power
The simultaneous visit to Moscow last month of two of the world’s most senior anti-corruption regulators highlights the attention governments are devoting to fighting corruption and the challenges they face in some of the biggest emerging markets. Lanny Breuer, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division, which manages the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and […]
Joe Phelan: Rolling up Sleeves for Development
In the world’s top corporate boardrooms, its lecture theatres and in the planning sessions of think tanks and development agencies such as my own, much is made of uncovering new business solutions for development challenges. Inclusive innovation is the current buzz. This is important work. Today, in rural Maharastra, India, I was reminded of another […]
Clare Melford: Japan Crisis: What is the Role of Business in disaster Response?
In one of the most dramatic pictures of earthquake and tsunami-hit Japan, a man is shown to pick his way through wreckage and over downed cables on his way to another shelter. He is not looking for his family, but for the 50 employees of the company he built and ran that was literally swept […]
Building the Pace on Inclusive Business Models
We have reached a tipping point in the way business sees its relationship with the developing world. A growing number of companies, from large multinationals to small-sized start-ups, are moving beyond philanthropic, risk mitigating, CSR-focused activities, to find new ways to do business that benefit both the poor and their core business. We are seeing […]
Great Expectations from New Entity UN Women
Earlier this week, I attended the UK launch of UN Women. Its Executive Director and Under-Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet addressed a packed audience in London to make the case for gender equality and women’s empowerment. She spoke evocatively about her hopes for UN Women and the World Bank’s upcoming report that positions gender equality as ‘smart […]
Peter Brew: Business Must Play its Role to Ensure Sustainable Growth in China
China, with the rest of Asia, has become the engine of growth that can fuel recovery in Europe and North America. It is imperative that a new mutually enhancing partnership is forged by governments and business based on sustainable economic, social, ethical and environmental practices. The role of business, however, in making this sustainable growth […]
The Key to an Engaging Employee Volunteer Program
If you want an engaging employee volunteer program, you’ll need to make it 3 dimensional. Here’s how. If you’re even vaguely familiar with Realized Worth, chances are you’ve heard us mention the “Journey of the Volunteer.” Whether in blogs, presentations, or client work we talk about this journey as much as we can. Why? It […]
Stephen Farrant: Responsible Business Goes Mainstream
As responsible tourism goes mainstream, the issues of environmental and social responsibility have been placed firmly on the agendas of global company boards. But the myth remains that it is only small specialist companies that have adopted a responsible tourism strategy. This is however, not the case and major global travel and tourism companies have […]