Grameen Caledonian College Of Nursing
Glasgow Caledonian University set up the Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing to support the poorest women in Bangladesh to become nurses, reducing mortality rates. Social impacts Boosted Bangladesh’s capacity to improve maternal health and reduce the child mortality rate by graduating 138 nurse-midwives, and recruiting 150 students in 2014 alone. Improved the financial position and […]
Shared Interest Society – Investing in a Fairer World
Shared Interest Society asks its members to invest in a fairer world and helps people in some of the poorest countries trade their way out of poverty. Social impacts Increased incomes and employment: last year, the 97 producer groups Shared Interest Society financed collectively earned revenues of £236,056,545. Greater equality and opportunity: last year, the […]
Hogan Lovells – Hunger and Acute Malnutrition
Hogan Lovells worked with Action Against Hunger to implement the Hunger and Acute Malnutrition project in Liberia, helping to keep child malnutrition below 5%. Social impacts 8,549 children (4% of the under five population) with severe acute malnutrition received treatment with a 90.3% recovery rate. 10 lawyers provided over 1,400 hours of pro bono advice […]
Development Challenges And Business Opportunities
Though the importance of the private sector role in economic growth has long been acknowledged, it is only in recent years that the full range of players and activities related to the private sector have started to be wholly embedded in development strategies and programmes. A recent major shift in the landscape of international development […]
A Guide To Working With Informal Financial Institutions
Amid the growing interest in building effective and scalable solutions to meet the financing needs of the world’s 450 million smallholder farmers, organizations rarely pay much attention to the thousands of informal financial institutions that can be found in rural communities throughout the world. Instead, discussions on ways to close the estimated $400 billion gap […]
Proactive Business Responses to International Disasters
Governments and the humanitarian community around the world are struggling to cope with the frequency and scale of international disasters. During Responsible Business Week 2014, senior business, INGOs and government representatives discussed the key opportunities and challenges to business engagement in international disaster response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness. The following highlights some of the key […]
Business Schools Stimulating Inclusive Leadership
To the question: “what are the most successful innovations around?”, most professionals would answer Facebook, Apple or Candy Crush. Less likely they would name SimGas, which provides affordable renewable energy for low-income people in East Africa, M-Pesa, the most successful mobile money transfer system for the unbanked in Kenya, or JITA, an innovative way of […]
Sustainability – Why Measuring Impact Matters
Over the past decade, we have seen increasing optimism about Africa’s economic prospects and governance. Once derided by The Economist as “the hopeless continent”, the last edition of this publication to focus on the region featured the cover story “Africa Rising”. Record growth rates in many African countries are underpinned by sustained political stability, the […]
A Warning and an Appeal to the Diamond Industry
In Africa and South America there are more than one and a half million diamond diggers working in arduous and highly dangerous conditions for paltry reward. They and their families – up to 10 million people in total – barely survive on less than two dollars a day and their communities are trapped in abject […]
Lessons on Supporting Energy Access Enterprises
What Support Do Energy Access Enterprises Need To Thrive?
Many enterprises are working to solve the huge problem of energy poverty in the developing world by delivering electricity to the 1.3 billion who live off the main grid, or by selling improved cook stoves to people cooking over smoky stoves or open fires that damage their health. Lots of donors, NGOs, investors and others […]
Google Hangout – Successful Product and Service Design
Taking The “Product” Out Of Product Design
Social entrepreneurs are driven by passion. We are people who have bold ideas to solve huge challenges, and have almost singular vision to the execution of our idea. Our products are our babies- we know every dimension, every line of code, or every component because we have spent many long evenings debugging, tinkering, sketching, and […]
Preparing The BoP Market
The markets that need innovative solutions the most, very often are not yet ready for them, which is a difficult barrier to overcome for successful growth of inclusive business models. For the base of the pyramid (BoP) market we often talk about push and pull products. Pull products being things that people immediately desire, such […]
There's Big Business in Toilets at the BoP
This is the story of a successful partnership between two organizations that share a passion for toilets: an NGO with 30+ years of making markets work for the poor and the largest toilet manufacturer in North America. Eventually, they made more impact together than either organization could make alone. Combining diverse expertise The idea of […]
There’s Big Business in Toilets at the BoP
This is the story of a successful partnership between two organizations that share a passion for toilets: an NGO with 30+ years of making markets work for the poor and the largest toilet manufacturer in North America. Eventually, they made more impact together than either organization could make alone. Combining diverse expertise The idea of […]
Bill Gates Can’t Build a Toilet
IN addition to eradicating polio in India and starting the personal computer revolution, the Seattle Superman of our age has managed to make going to the bathroom a cause célèbre. Five years ago, if I’d told people I worked on toilets, they would have surely assumed I was a plumber. Now, they exclaim: “Oh! Isn’t […]
Marketing WASH Products To The Base Of The Pyramid
Carole de Bazignan, Antenna Technologies, May 2014 As stated by Urs Heierli, economist and director of msd consulting (www.poverty.ch), reality is such that very few success stories have emerged so far and BOP marketing is a very demanding task: to design products and services that poor people can afford is not easy and to setup […]
Creating Access to Safe Drinking Water
Access to safe drinking water is a significant problem globally, with over 784 million people worldwide lacking access[1]. Waterborne disease is a leading cause of illness in developing countries, contributing to the death of approximately two million children every year. Sub Saharan Africa is the worst affected region, where 40% of the population is still […]
Easy Latrine Scale-up And The Power Of Markets
The Problem and Context iDE believes in the power of the market—the private sector—to improve lives and livelihoods. In the places that iDE works—rural areas of developing countries—the markets for many basic goods and services do not work; either they do not exist or they operate very ineffectively. Historically, the “civil society sector” – that […]