The BIG Smallholder Opportunity
By Dian Hollman, Program Officer, GIZ and Christina Gradl, Founder and Managing Director, Endeva Over the past few years, agriculture has returned to the center stage of the development agenda – particularly as price fluctuations and demographic growth aggravate the challenge of food security. A staggering 870 million people, 12 percent of the world’s population, […]
Women Mean Business: Supporting Enterprising Women
At Paper Craft Africa in the Bwebajja neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, Harriet Nantale oversees a bustling workshop. Outside, employees soak and recycle paper, banana fiber and pineapple fiber, creating thick sheets of paper in vibrant colors. Inside, the team uses the paper and other recycled material to craft calendars, notebooks, cards, jewelry, soap and other […]
Building a new framework for youth entrepreneurship
From November 12 – 18, 35,000 events in 127 countries will take place during Global Entrepreneurship Week to inspire people to become a force for change. The time is right, as governments across the world are desperate to find solutions to the growing challenge of youth unemployment. High youth unemployment is no longer limited to […]
Scale Up: How do Social Enterprises Meet the Challenge?
Executives from three leading social enterprises—Jaipur Rugs Company, Sproxil, and WaterHealth International—met in New York City on Monday, September 24 to discuss the challenges of scaling up double-bottom line businesses that generate both commercial returns and sustainable development impacts. The Business Call to Action (BCtA), in collaboration with Columbia Business School’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, […]
Helping Corporates achieve Sustainable Development Goals through new funding models
The innovative Carbon for Water programme unlocked private sector finance to deliver safe water to 4.5 million people a year. For 15 years, ClimateCare has worked with large blue chip organisations who, having taken steps to reduce carbon emissions and want to address their residual footprint, by funding external emission reduction projects. Our name is […]
Building an inclusive businessmovement in the Asia-Pacific
How can corporate Australia do more to address global poverty? This was the question that in 2006 brought together a group of leading and progressive Australian companies, and soon after, led to the formation of Business for Millennium Development (previously named Business for Poverty Relief Alliance). Founded as a collaboration between government, business and charity, […]
Crowding to a Cause
Crowdfunding is generally defined as an internet-based collective effort between people who pool money to help fund an activity or an entrepreneurial endeavor. Also called crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is used to underwrite a variety of activities, including new products, artistic efforts, political campaigns or scientific research, just to name a few. In return, if a product […]
Beyond the MDGs: Business and the New Development Agenda
At a recent event in New York held to coincide with UN General Assembly week, I joined senior representatives from the private sector, development organisations, NGOs and academia to discuss the role for business in developing and delivering a new development framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015. In defining a role […]
Promoting New Thinking About Collaboration
Millions of Australians will end it comatose, as the annual Melbourne Cup tradition of drinking-your-entire-body-weight-in-beer-before-lunch will ensure that particular country’s collective outputs for 24 hours will be, at best, sub-optimal. As the table-top dancing down under comes to a close, the United States of America will awake to Election Day, with polls still saying the […]
The Role of Business and Post-2015
Business plays a crucial role in the development process. Without small businesses creating jobs, or large business innovating and creating products that can transform the lives of poor people, we would not have witnessed such remarkable progress toward the current Millennium Development Goals. Business was largely an afterthought in the development of the MDG framework. […]
DFID, Business and the Post-2015 Agenda
Last week members of the UN High Level Panel met in London to discuss the successor to the Millennium Development Goal framework. The meetings, co-chaired by PM Cameron, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, represent a unique opportunity to reflect on what new framework could drive poverty eradication when the […]
DFID, Business and the Post-2015 Development Agenda
Last week members of the UN High Level Panel met in London to discuss the successor to the Millennium Development Goal framework. The meetings, co-chaired by PM Cameron, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, represent a unique opportunity to reflect on what new framework could drive poverty eradication when the […]
What is the role of business in achieving development goals post-2015?
In the period since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established business has made a considerable impact on poverty reduction. In the second edition of ‘Business and the MDGs: A Framework for Action’, published in 2008, IBLF identified the three spheres of influence though which the positive impacts of business occur: core business, community investment […]
Post-2015: Why a focus on business responsibility and tax would be a missed opportunity
In contrast to twelve years ago, when the Millennium Development Goals were first agreed, now – as the world starts to think about what will replace them in 2015 – business is very much on the agenda. Business Fights Poverty has co-hosted two events that looked at this (one on Tuesday and one in September), […]
Business, the MDGs and Beyond
The world has made more gains against poverty in the last 50 years than in the last 500. Since 1990, over six hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty. The world is within reach of seeing every child enrolled in primary school, and many fewer lives are being lost to hunger and disease. […]
The Secretary General’s High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda
This note provides a brief overview of the first meeting of the Secretary General’s High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, and provides some information on plans for the second meeting, to be held on 1 November in London, UK. The High Level Panel is committed to an open, transparent, and […]
The Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda
Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Africa
On Tuesday, I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya to attend and participate in the first-ever DEMO Africa event. As the plane was landing, I was struck by how history has a way of turning one on his head. While I was a graduate student in the late 1990s at Virginia Tech, I launched an African-focused web […]
Fostering the Growth of Inclusive Businesses
Doing business with the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) isn’t exactly “business as usual”. From the start-up to the scale-up phases companies doing business with the poor come with their own set of challenges. How to overcome challenges for scaling-up and replicating commercially viable inclusive business modelswas the focus of the first G20 Inclusive Business […]
Competitions Work
Perhaps it’s in my American DNA. Or, perhaps, it’s because I am enticed, like many, by the lure of a shiny prize. And it doesn’t even have to be a big one. Just last summer, for example, I signed my six-year-old up for the annual cherry pit spitting competition here in Zug. Why put the […]