Making the Global Goals Our Business
Not everyone gets to live their dream job, but I feel extremely lucky and grateful that I do. I lead GSK’s global employee volunteering efforts, including PULSE, our flagship program. PULSE is a skills-based volunteering program that matches up to 100 high-performing employees each year with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in need of their expertise […]
5 Reasons Social Enterprises are Applying a Gender Lens
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Acumen There is article after article about why businesses and investors should seek new ways to be more inclusive of women in their business models. But what we’ve learned at Acumen, where we invest in business that solve problems of poverty, is that leaders of social-purpose businesses are already doing this, […]
Unleashing Inclusive Business Towards the SDGs
The Business Call to Action (BCtA) in collaboration with the UNDP Zambia Country Office, The Partnering Initiative (TPI), the Inclusive Business Accelerator (IBA) and Business Fights Poverty recently held a high-level breakfast meeting for business representatives in Lusaka, Zambia. The aim of the meeting held on the 15th of April 2016 was to discuss how […]
Three Ways Your Business Can Use the SDGs
Following the launch of the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development, there is general agreement that these targets can only be achieved if all areas of society, including governments, NGOs and the private sector, act together. Under the new framework, businesses now have a more explicit, central role in ‘ending extreme poverty, fighting inequality & […]
NGOs Applying Lessons of Market Dynamics
I’ve encouraged all types of mission-driven organizations to explore applying any business principles toward social goals, and NGOs can benefit from a number of lessons from Shared Value, Lean Startups, Behavioral Economics, or Social Enterprises. However, my point in focusing on market dynamics crowd sourcing insights on needs and value is to zero in on […]
Co-creation Shaking Up the Health Sector
Imagine that you are the founder of a healthcare start-up. You have passion, experience, and a strong team of changemakers around you – but you lack the resources to take your organisation to the next level of growth. Now imagine that you are given the opportunity to work with one of the world’s leading healthcare […]
The Secret Sauce in Shared Value
As an enthusiast for new solutions to old problems I wonder: Are you as excited as I am by relatively recent developments of social enterprises, shared value, behavioral economics and/or lean startups for social change? Or do you skeptically forecast which of these business approaches might just be fads? Even for skeptics, there’s a fundamental […]
Game-changing Ideas to Tackle Drivers of Cassava Loss
Anyone reading this has their own story to tell about food waste. One of the first lessons we are taught – wherever in the world we call home – is “don’t waste food.” And while we all have some sense of our own responsibility for solving this global problem, bigger challenges loom large. Chew on […]
The Global Goals and the Ruggie Principles
“The Sustainable Development Goals represent the biggest opportunity for awareness-raising on business and human rights since the UN Guiding Principles [on Business and Human Rights] were introduced.” So said a respected speaker at the recent Business and Human Rights Symposium organised by the International Organisation of Employers. Equally, there is a consensus that the skills, […]
Beyond Dialogue: Corporation and Social Enterprise Partnerships
On April 12th, Acumen and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship hosted a workshop in Oxford, England with representatives from large corporations and smaller social businesses from around the globe. At the workshop, entitled “Beyond Dialogue,” we asked: How can we build business models that truly serve the poor through collaboration among corporations and social […]
Investing in Social Enterprise to Fight Poverty
Rupert Scofield will be speaking at a dinner hosted by Women Advancing Microfinance UK on Tuesday 10th May in London. He will talk to us about the work FINCA does and the impact it’s having, in particular in the social enterprise and innovation space. Tickets to the event are available here. Ahead of the event, […]
How Small Farmers Can End Poverty and Hunger
Private companies are discovering that small farms are big business at the same time as the development community is realizing that they are key to ending poverty and hunger. There are 500 million small farms in the world, and their potential is huge. Indeed, small farms are responsible for up to 80 per cent of […]
Transcending the Boundaries of Business School
In order to transform our world and achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we must look beyond the ‘way we do things’ in our own industries, learn to be adaptive and work in multi-sector teams. In early 2006, I walked into a room where the global CEO of Unilever, Barclays Bank, Porsche and […]
Transcending Boundaries through Contextual Intelligence
Disruption, innovation, inclusion. These days, there is a multitude of business school jargon used to discuss development, both in the realm of the public and private sector. But here is another one for you: contextual intelligence, achieved through innovation and inclusion. Contextual intelligence is the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to […]
Banking on Change Helps the World’s Poorest Save $34m
More than 5,000 informal savings groups have been linked to formal banking sector Six years ago CARE undertook a pioneering partnership called Banking on Change with Barclays and Plan UK that has since helped more than 758,000 people, who typically live on less than $2 a day. In the past 3 years, we’ve supported 400,000 […]
IMF Evidence Supporting Financial Inclusion
A recent IMF ‘staff paper’ (i.e. this is not the official view of the organisation, but they’re not disagreeing with it either…) provides additional support to CARE’s fight for financial inclusion by showing that four of the dimensions of financial development – access, depth, efficiency and stability – can significantly reduce income inequality and poverty. […]
Social Entrepreneurs Defining the Future of Healthcare
There is a global crisis in healthcare; the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one billion people lack access to basic care, and a further 100 million are pushed into poverty trying to access it. The situation doesn’t look likely to improve. The WHO estimates that there will be a deficit of more than 12 […]
Design Funding in Emerging and Frontier Markets
Earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, we welcomed the launch of Convergence: a platform that helps public and private investors find and connect with each other to co-invest in “blended finance” deals in emerging and frontier markets. Blended finance is the use of public and philanthropic funds to attract private capital […]
A Framework for Justice
From the program of the 2016 Skoll World Forum. Justice is our north star. It provides the bearings to guide us through territory fraught with tests of character and will. It steers us to ever more powerful solutions to the pressing problems of our time. It summons in us the courage and fortitude to tackle […]
2016 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship
Kicking off this week’s 13th Annual Skoll World Forum, we are pleased to announce the six recipients of the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll Awards distinguish transformative leaders whose organizations are disrupting the status quo, driving large-scale “equilibrium” change, and are poised to create even greater impact on the world. This year’s […]