Agribusiness and Climate Change: The Smart Way Forward
The world’s smallholder farmers – and therefore much of the planet’s food supply – are under severe threat from climate change. While many businesses are stepping up their response to these complex challenges, and increasingly advocating for pragmatic and science-based solutions, many are frequently met with mistrust and opposition. I have often heard businesses offer […]
NGOs Scaling Social Impact Through Business Ideas
Listen to the recording of the discussion with Erik Simanis, Head of the Frontier Markets Initiative at Cornell University, and Anna Gerrard, Technical Advisor: market-based and private sector programmes at Sightsavers, about why and how NGOs are exploring the use of business models to scale their social impact.
Three Ways to Strengthen Healthcare Systems
The Ebola outbreak exposed what we have all known for many years – healthcare systems in the poorest countries are chronically underfunded, under-resourced and fragmented. This leaves them ill-equipped to deal with everyday challenges like malaria and diarrhoea – that claim hundreds of thousands of children’s lives each year – let alone public health crises […]
Corporations Supporting Women’s Economic Progress
The past month has seen multiple global events commemorating International Women’s Day, including CCC’s stellar collaboration with the UN Office of Partnerships and UN Women, The Empowerment Bridge: Building a Lifetime of Opportunity for Wome… These events have emphasized some common points: though the world has seen much progress for women and girls in the […]
The Power of the Mobile Phone to Change Lives
Celeste Boca holding the airtime (phone credit) that she sells. She enrolled in AMIMO’s (Association of Migrant Miners Mozambique) income generating activities workshop, supported by VSO through the Phoning Out Poverty and AIDS (POPA) project. The training is also supported by Mcel, a Mozambican phone company, who provide subsidized airtime that the women can sell […]
Economically Empowering Women Through The SDGs
The real challenge for the new Sustainable Development Goals is what happens after they are agreed. Deciding on the goals and targets is only the first step; backing them up with the commitment to implement them is crucial. The emerging consensus between the private sector, civil society, governments and multilateral agencies on the need for […]
Together, To Get Every Child Learning
The single most important contribution that Pearson can make to society is to equip people with the skills they need to progress in life and work. But every day, millions of children miss out on the opportunity to attend school and to learn those skills. Half of all out-of-school children live in countries affected by […]
Intel's Global Women and Girls Initiative
Suzanne Fallender, Director, Global Women and Girls Initiative, Intel speaking at this year’s International Women’s Day Forum In mid-April, CCC and the Harvard Kennedy School Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative released A Path to Empowerment: The role of corporations in supporting women…. The report, based on a series of invitation-only, high level roundtables, offers a three-pronged […]
Intel’s Global Women and Girls Initiative
Suzanne Fallender, Director, Global Women and Girls Initiative, Intel speaking at this year’s International Women’s Day Forum In mid-April, CCC and the Harvard Kennedy School Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative released A Path to Empowerment: The role of corporations in supporting women…. The report, based on a series of invitation-only, high level roundtables, offers a three-pronged […]
Corporate Support to Newborn Health
Photo: © ayzh By Leith Greenslade,Vice-Chair at the MDG Health Alliance The news that a handful of corporations comprised 40 percent of the new commitments made at the launch of the Every Newborn Action Plan in 2014 caught the attention of many in the global maternal and child health community. As a neglected area of […]
Changing Gender Roles and Nutrition in Bangladesh
Every morning, Lipi cycles down the dusty roads of Mitapukur, a small village in northern Bangladesh, balancing a bag filled with products on her shoulder. Lipi is one of the 160 Nutritional Sales Agents that was trained by the PROOFS (Profitable Opportunities for Food Security) project, an initiative of the three NGOs ICCO, iDE, BoP […]
Is There Really Only One Health SDG?
Many in the global health community were initially dismayed at the realization that there was only one goal devoted to health in the proposed Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “We had 3 out of 8 goals in the MDGs,” went the collective grumble, “health risks being marginalized in the SDGs.” The Business and Health Action […]
How Can Business Fight Ebola? Beyond “Gift-in-Kind”
Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s Assistant Minister of Health stated recently: “We must use this momentum not just to get back to where we were, but to build up health systems to last beyond this crisis and into the next.” (Devex, 3 Pitfalls Ebola Recovery must avoid, May 2015). While there is need to see opportunities for […]
UNICEF: Ebola and Technology
In our highly inter-connected world, nowhere seems very far away anymore. The scenes in West Africa where thousands of new cases of Ebola were being reported per week at its peak made very uncomfortable viewing and Unicef saw a huge surge in support from individuals and companies alike all keen to play their part in […]
Business Interests are Human Interests
The private sector had a lot to contribute to fight ebola and continues to play a role in the road to zero and future recovery. A lot of this was (and continues to be) outside the traditional framework of the private sector as donors. Some of these contributions are quantifiable, e.g. members of the Ebola […]
The Private Sector and Ebola, Working Towards Recovery
Stephen Seckor with one of his nieces, Monrovia, Liberia. Credit: Abbie TraylerSmith/Oxfam “Now I take care of 13 children. I lost four persons – my mother, my father, my two sisters. I was also very sick. Since I came back from the Ebola Treatment Unit I lost my job. I have nothing to do. I […]
The Role of the Private Sector in Post-Ebola Recovery
For more than one year Ebola has raged in West Africa. Thankfully, we are beginning to see the end of the epidemic with Liberia now having being declared ‘Ebola-free’ after 42 days with no new cases – and new infection rates at very low levels in Sierra Leone and Guinea. This is good news. But, […]
Getting to Zero and Beyond: Private Sector Contribution
The Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone has been an unprecedented development challenge and has prompted a huge international response, including from business who established the Ebola Private Sector Mobilisation Group (EPSMG). I recently joined the team in DFID leading the work in Sierra Leone, having spent the last 18 months developing DFID’s […]
Ebola – The View From Sierra Leone
A few weeks ago, I travelled to Sierra Leone, the country at the epicentre of the Ebola crisis. More than 20,000 people here have suffered from the disease, and more than 10,000 have died – this, in a country that has spent more than a decade recovering from a devastating civil war. Standard Chartered has […]
Business Action on the Post-2015 Development Agenda
2015 is set to be a landmark year for sustainable development. By the end of 2015, we should have in place a new set of global development priorities: the Sustainable Development Goals, a new framework for financing and delivering them, and a legally binding climate change agreement. A key difference today compared to 2000, when […]