Interview with Komal Sinha on CSR Trends in India
Komal Sinha, Head of Partnerships at ClimateCare’s India Office, has been working with CSR teams to plan and implement corporate social responsibility programmes in large corporates in India for over 10 years. In that time, she has witnessed a drastic shift in how organisation’s CSR priorities have changed. Two years on from India’s implementation of […]
Why International Volunteering is (In)valuable to Your Company
Getting involved in international corporate volunteering can leave you with mixed emotions. It sounds alluring, but you might get laughed out of the board room for making the case. The crucial question you will need to answer is; what would volunteers and the business get in return from spending anything from a month to a […]
The Case for Improving Job Quality in Supply Chains
Improving job quality in supply chains benefits everyone. More reasonable working hours, fairer pay and better working conditions are all fundamental for employees – and companies gain as a result of implementing these measures too. Doing so can improve productivity, protect a brand’s reputation and, according to research from KPMG, increase profit margins by as […]
Saving the Lives of One Million Children
GSK’s partnership with Save the Children is a Finalist in the Unilever Global Development Award supported by Business Fights Poverty. We asked them some questions about their programme and the global development impacts achieved. Q) What challenge does the GSK-Save the Children partnership serve to change? In 2015, 5.9 children under the age of five […]
Tackling Slavery in Supply Chains – What Can We Do?
The ILO estimates that there are approximately 21 million people enslaved around the world at present – these will include many people who are in bonded labour, those trafficked and kept against their will in enslaved situations – but slavery also exists in global supply chains. Modern Slavery can also take the form of exploitation […]
Three Key Steps to Empowering Women in Global Value Chains
Global value chains can be a powerful lever for empowering women, but companies must identify where women work, must develop a clear gender strategy and must articulate the business case for supporting women. As the UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment continues to develop its thinking over the next few months, they should […]
Transforming Cotton Supply Chains in Côte d’Ivoire
Olam International is a Finalist in the Unilever Global Development Award supported by Business Fights Poverty. We asked them some questions about their programme and the lessons learnt. Q) How did Olam International’s programme begin? When we began operating in Côte D’Ivoire in 2008 we had to consider a number of risks. The region was […]
Catalysing Impact Investing in East Africa
FSG’s newest office, located in Mumbai, houses our inclusive markets team, which works to develop and scale inclusive business models to create new opportunities and better lives for the global poor. Learn more about our inclusive markets approach. While East Africa has demonstrated robust growth over the past years, poverty is still widespread. Across the […]
Increasing Supply and Demand for Healthcare in Kenya
In a country where one child in 19 dies before their fifth birthday, a typical scenario in Kenya’s western county of Bungoma can be; a mother-to-be is feeling ill; she is not sure whether she should go to hospital, but the husband doesn’t think it’s important, so she stays home. Or the husband is supportive, […]
Innovations in Safe Water for Millions
Unsafe drinking water is a global problem that affects more than 660 million people every day. And yes, we know there are low-cost solutions that have been proven to work in rigorous scientific studies – for millions of people with the least access to safe drinking water. Evidence Action is a social enterprise that develops […]
To Help Save Children’s Lives, We Need to Be Bold
Only by breaking down boundaries and working together in unprecedented ways can we tackle the entrenched issues which cause millions of children to continue to die each year from preventable causes. That was the shared understanding which brought GSK and Save the Children together three years ago, creating a groundbreaking partnership to help save one […]
Effective Workplace Policies and Practices
Hope is not a strategy for righting gender imbalances that have long been the norm in most businesses and beyond. Instead, a strategy addressing material issues, supported by policies and practices applied internally and externally, can deliver business benefits as well as benefits for individuals. Research shows that a more diverse workforce delivers financial returns […]
Unleashing Inclusive Business Towards the SDGs
The Business Call to Action (BCtA) – a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) hosted global platform showcasing private sector contribution to the SDGs through inclusive business – in collaboration with Inclusive Business Accelerator (IBA), SNV Netherlands Development Organization (SNV), The Partnering Initiative (TPI) and Business Fights Poverty hosted an invitation- only event to discuss how […]
Preparing to Stop Drug-resistant Malaria
By David Reddy, CEO, Medicines for Malaria Venture and Jürgen Brokatzky-Geiger, Global Head of Corporate Responsibility, Novartis. No child should ever die from a mosquito bite. Yet, today, in an era of extraordinary medical advancement, a child dies of mosquito-borne malaria every two minutes. Last year, this agonizing blood disease caused by the malaria parasite […]
Pointing the Way for Cross-sector Collaborations
One of the most striking aspects of the current healthcare landscape is the way that the whole world is now so interconnected and so interdependent. This is changing the way we see health, creating a new global perspective that will affect the way we need to act. Against this backdrop, we need to understand better […]
Four Reasons Why GSK and Save the Children’s Partnership Stands Out
In recent years, collaboration between companies, governments and civil society has become an integral part of the development landscape. Its importance has been underlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which all sectors recognise cannot be achieved without partnership and the contribution of the private sector. Growing numbers of businesses are entering into partnerships, whether […]
Moving Beyond Transactional Relationships
Over the last several years, models of business / NGO collaboration have begun to shift quite significantly. Five years ago, the relationship between a company and an NGO was most likely to be transactional in nature: a donation or sponsorship from the company or, in the case of a company’s social investment, a fee-for-service arrangement […]
Barriers Facing Rural Producers in Post-conflict Colombia
In May, as part of my role as ACRE’s (Access to Capital for Rural Enterprises) project lead, I spent ten days in Colombia scoping the impact investment space and the barriers facing rural producers in a country that it is now emerging from fifty years of civil conflict. Colombia, a country emerging from 50 years […]
Partnering for Mutual Benefit not Dependency
In the early 2000’s I was seconded to a large multi-national company to work on an exciting inclusive business (IB) project that the company’s chief executive had recently announced to the world at a major conference. With a UN organization playing a convening role, the project was designed as a partnership that would transform small […]
Empowering Women Through Work
One of the first activities we launched in our Challenge on Women’s Economic Empowerment was the business survey created by DFID and introduced in a blog by the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Justine Greening, on 25 April. The survey asked respondents to share both the challenges and successes their businesses have seen […]