A Call for More Entrepreneurs to Focus on Toilets
Entrepreneurs are everywhere these days, not just in the purely for-profit world but also those looking to create social, as well as financial, gain. As the international development community grows, entrepreneurial thinking is becoming ever more mainstream, with social enterprises demonstrating how to create businesses that deliver social benefit. As Naveen Jain, technology and spacecraft […]
Emerging Lessons on Scaling Inclusive Distribution Networks
One of the most difficult and underestimated hurdles to doing business in low-income markets is figuring out how products make their way from production to the final customer. In India, more than 90 percent of all retail purchases are made in 12 million kirana stores and in Mexico, more than 50 percent of retail business […]
How Do You Incentivise More Businesses to Operate More Responsibly?
Last week I joined Chatham House at their Responsible Business Conference, alongside representatives from across the public, private and NGO sectors, including Vodafone, Nestle, the UN Global Compact and the UK Minister for Corporate Responsibility. Together we considered a broad range of questions, starting with: How do you incentivise more businesses to operate more responsibly? […]
Breakthroughs in Fertilizer Can Unlock the Riches in the Soil
Throughout history, the relationship between a farmer and his land has been symbiotic. As long ago as 6,000BC, Neolithic smallholders in Europe used nitrogen-rich manure to maintain the soil’s fertility, understanding that the land provides but it must also be “fed”. Later, soil health became so important that countries were prepared to go to war […]
The Inclusive Innovators
Inclusive business — the pursuit of opportunities in traditionally unattractive or currently unprofitable market segments – is, increasingly, a strategic imperative for companies. Foregoing such segments could mean opening the door to disruption and closing it to options for future growth; this is an especially crucial concern that relates to developing economies, which represent the […]
Social Entrepreneurs Beware – Don’t Ignore those Institutional Forces
Social entrepreneurship is on the rise in emerging economies. More and more, established firms and start-ups are seeking to position themselves to address the world’s most pressing problems and environmental concerns via enterprise structures that focus equally on commercial and social goals. However, much of the mainstream literature has emphasised management, innovation and investment toolkits […]
Can Complex Development Be Explained on a Bar of Chocolate?
How can Mondelēz International – the world’s biggest chocolate company – show their consumers that their chocolate is produced in a sustainable way? I was recently in Ghana with a group of Mondelēz’s European staff, seeing for themselves how their company is working with cocoa farmers through its Cocoa Life sustainability programme. The purpose of […]
Future Perspectives
The Financial Inclusion Forum’s flagship event in 2016 was hosted during Financial Inclusion Week. The gathering, organised with the EBRD, provided an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of financial inclusion. If you missed the event, you can watch the recording and read highlights below. Technology was a recurring theme during the […]
Business Must Stand Up as a Champion of Progressive Values
Recent events in the US and UK have reminded me of a love story. When I was 12, I vividly remember my grandmother telling me the story of how in her early 20s she met and fell in love with my grandfather. But theirs was no ordinary love story. You see, she was an Anglo-Irish […]
Business Fights Poverty NYC 2016: Video and Summary Report
10.5 Million Opportunities – Leveraging Savings Groups with Business Training
Hand in Hand International Ten-and-a-half million. That’s the number of Savings Group members worldwide. For more than two decades, in 70 countries, the groups have been credited with banking the unbanked, improving women’s economic empowerment and strengthening social cohesion. Now, according new research, another triumph can be added to the list: boosting business incomes by […]
The Social Enterprise Landscape: Good News First or Bad?
Empowering Women Cocoa Farmers
The World Cocoa Foundation Partnership Meeting (WCFPM) from 26th – 27th October 2016 brought together key leaders within the cocoa industry from private, public and civil society organisations. Attendees discussed the challenges of ensuring the sustainability of cocoa and farmers’ livelihoods. This year, the WCFPM was hosted in Côte d’Ivoire – described as the ‘land […]
Making the Most of Sustainability Opportunities
Environmental and social considerations are often presented as risks to businesses. However, if they’re properly integrated into strategies and decision-making they can very much become opportunities. For example, research from KPMG suggests implementing measures to improve job quality can increase profit margins by as much as 0.4 per cent in industries where profit margins typically […]
Poverty Footprint: A Unique Tool to Assess Business Impacts on Sustainable Development
By Ursula Wynhoven, Chief, Social Sustainability, Governance & Legal, UN Global Compact and Helen Van Hoeven, Deputy Director, Private Sector Department, Oxfam America As engines of economic growth, global companies have wide-ranging opportunities to positively affect the lives of the poor. Yet, company impacts on people living in poverty are largely not understood and under-reported. […]
Collaborating Across Sectors to Further Global Health
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 specific goals, and 169 associated targets that set out quantitative objectives across the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, all to be achieved by 2030 (United Nations, 2015). Health has been recognized as crucial for sustainable human development (Alleyne et al., 2013) and an essential contributor […]
Supporting Cacao Producers in Latin America
UK Chocolate Week celebrates the world of fine chocolate from 10th to 16th October, 2016. Chocolate Week aims to promote fine flavour chocolate, independent artisan chocolatiers and chocolate companies who work in direct partnership with cocoa farmers, encouraging consumers to pay a fairer price for their chocolate. Christian Aid has been actively engaged in high […]
Discovering New-found Respect for Philanthropy
Ernst & Young Global Limited I’ve always had a bit of a downer on corporate philanthropy, having tended to equate it with first generation sustainability strategy and practice – a model based on ‘giving something back’ that often pays little or no heed to what the corporation takes in the first place. In so doing, […]
Collaboration in Support of Micro-Enterprises in Value Chains
The “Growing Together” report – guidance to businesses to support them in helping micro-enterprises in their value chains to thrive, and why that is important for women’s economic empowerment. Our new report – “Growing Together”, developed with SABMiller, the Harvard Kennedy Corporate Responsibility Initiative and Business Fights Poverty, sets out why businesses should take a […]
The ‘Root’ to Women’s Empowerment
Growing up in rural south-east Nigeria, as the first born child in my family, I assisted my mum in her small business as she struggled to make a living. When the opportunity to go and live with my aunt in eastern Nigerian arose, I was excited; I thought I would be relieved from the hard […]