Hybrid Social Finance: Partnerships That Drive Success
By Bernard Coffey, Former business leader and long-time volunteer, Ashoka Support Network (ASN) team It was a simple networking dinner where a business executive met a social entrepreneur with a great idea, which led to a long-term and very successful partnership in the nascent field of social finance and “impact investing.” The social entrepreneur, Luke […]
Corporate Impact Venturing at the BOP
The base of the global economic pyramid (BoP) comprises 4 billion people and represents a $5 trillion USD market opportunity. Both corporates and entrepreneurs recognize this large and growing opportunity. Both struggle to realize it. Corporate Impact Venturing allows them to complement each other’s weaknesses and reinforce their strengths. Together, they can reach the scale […]
Bringing Smallholders into The Global Market
Investing in smallholders has the most immediate impact on poverty reduction and employment in Africa, but how can larger businesses bring smallholder development into their business models? Smallholder farmers produce the majority of Africa’s food, and the sector as a whole is responsible for the greatest number of jobs in the continent by far. At […]
Making Solar Power Affordable
Author: John Converse Townsend, Ashoka Mexico’s solar energy market is booming. And that means more and more people, even those living on less than $7 per day, can afford clean electricity. The second-most populated country in the Americas is home to the fastest-growing regional solar market in the world. About 97 percent of Mexico’s population […]
How Successful Partnerships Will Fuel Agenda 2030
(SHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images) By Fiona Koch, Communications Manager, Ashoka Ireland All eyes were on New York last week as the UN launched its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); a new package of economic, social and environmental objectives designed to replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With 17 overarching aims broken down into 169 targets, the […]
Collaborative Action to Accelerate Growth with Impact
Yasmina Zaidman, Director, Strategic Partnerships, Acumen On a cold January afternoon in 2012, at Dow’s headquarters in Midland, Michigan, I sat at a large conference table with representatives from across Dow’s venture fund, foundation, sustainability team, and human resources department. This was the first meeting of its kind that I had attended with one of […]
B2B Collaboration that Drives Growth and Impact
A significant shift is happening in the way global corporations and mission-driven organizations see poverty, food security, water scarcity, climate change, and other sustainable development challenges—a convergence around the view, expressed so well by management guru Peter Drucker, that “every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise.” At […]
Corporate-NGO Inclusive Business Partnerships
At our Inclusion Inc. conference at The Fletcher School, there was a fascinating conversation between Tim Cross, President of YouthBuild International, and two of YouthBuild’s corporate partners, Lata Reddy, President of The Prudential Foundation and Dina Silver Pokedoff, Senior Manager of Branding for the Saint-Gobain Corporation. What I particularly enjoyed about the discussion was that […]
Lost in Translation? Lessons for Business and NGOs
“I see the change we need to make. I’m ready to go for it!” said a corporate executive after a partnership design meeting with CARE. CARE staff said the same. These are the moments where we feel transformation happening in the room. We have worked through tough issues and we know we are co-creating something […]
Using the Right Language for Each Stage of Growth
Counterfeit products cause huge social problems—estimates suggest that counterfeit tuberculosis and malaria drugs alone cause approximately 700,000 deaths each year—and Sproxil takes a business approach to solve them. Our Mobile Product AuthenticationTM solution can verify the authenticity of almost any product. A sticker with a unique code hidden under a scratch-off layer is applied to […]
More than Semantics: Does Terminology Affect Scale and Impact?
Nearly 100 companies, development donors, and NGO partners had just finished listening to the opening panel in a two-day workshop we had organized to focus on ways companies could expand economic opportunity for people living at the base of the economic pyramid. The year was 2007, and the CSR Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School […]
Delivering Care to Last Mile Communities
Traditional hospital-based services are not able to reach some of the world’s poorest and most remote villages. Over one billion people globally, including 400 million Africans, lack access to health services because they live too far from a health facility. Rural communities know that if a child becomes ill, the long walk for treatment could […]
Lessons on Inclusive Supply Chains and Achieving Scale
How does one measure the success of a business today? Is it commercial viability or the ecosystem it creates to promote sustainable development through stronger market linkages and supporting the most marginalised? Or can it be both? In a world when double and triple bottom lines are increasingly de rigueur, we now look at inclusive […]
Financial Inclusion: Hybrid Models for a Complex World
Fashion, fish and financial inclusion. What connects all three? In Bangladesh these are all part of an evolved structure put in place by BRAC that combines community empowerment with sustainability and shared values. BRAC is synonymous with business and market-based solutions in Bangladesh, where the breadth and scope of our work is felt at a […]
Embracing Emerging Market Entrepreneurship
Twice a year, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE)convenes our Executive Committee—a group of fifteen international development leaders that guide ANDE’s strategy and provide operational oversight. At the most recent meeting, we opened with a “pop quiz” — What are the three biggest challenges facing small and growing businesses in emerging markets over the […]
Africa's Digital Revolution
Just over 20 years ago, Robert Kaplan wrote a stark warning about the mounting strategic danger posed by an anarchic, uncontrollable, “increasing lawlessness” in West Africa. He argued that a sort of ‘criminal anarchy’ was emerging as a major strategic danger. Six years later, the Economist ran an editorial naming Africa ‘the Hopeless Continent’, claiming […]
Africa’s Digital Revolution
Just over 20 years ago, Robert Kaplan wrote a stark warning about the mounting strategic danger posed by an anarchic, uncontrollable, “increasing lawlessness” in West Africa. He argued that a sort of ‘criminal anarchy’ was emerging as a major strategic danger. Six years later, the Economist ran an editorial naming Africa ‘the Hopeless Continent’, claiming […]
India’s Companies Act – The 2% Solution
Money should begin flowing to Indian sustainability projects following new legislation. Are the givers and the receivers ready? NGO work is often hard and thankless, an unending attempt to do a lot with a little. However, a groundbreaking Indian law that requires large corporations to invest 2% of their profits in sustainability initiatives may make […]
Major Problems, Micro Solutions
Access to healthcare in Indonesia is an on-going crisis – with 152,000 children under five years old dying annually, and an average life expectancy approximately 10 years lower than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. With a gross national income of $3563 per capita, and around 28 million people living below the poverty […]
Tracking Reach at the Base of the Pyramid
By Lara Sinha, Hub Manager, The Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business Changing lives for people at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP): easy to say, tough to deliver, and very tough to define and measure. Although nearly all inclusive businesses and social investors aim to benefit clients at the BoP, there is huge diversity in […]