Combatting Illegal Logging with a Responsible Timber Exchange
The illegal production and trade of tropical timber is one of the main drivers of environmental degradation worldwide, leading to loss of habitats and biodiversity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, human rights abuses and corruption. Sustainable forest management can provide livelihoods for forest peoples, and economic activity in rural areas, but these benefits are erased when […]
Lightening the Load of Women’s Unpaid Care Work
We’re excited to announce a three-year partnership with Unilever’s Surf brand that aims to recognise, reduce and redistribute the amount of time spent by women and girls on unpaid care work. In some parts of the world women and girls currently spend as many as six hours a day on unpaid care work – a […]
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 […]
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 […]
What Does “Good” Look Like for Companies Trying to Address Modern Slavery?
As the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights opens today in Geneva, Quintin Lake, Research Fellow at Hult International Business School, discusses modern slavery. Addressing modern slavery is becoming a business-critical for companies – for credibility with customers, investors, NGOs and the public – according to new research by Hult International Business School and […]
A Conversation with Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Internationally recognized development economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala served as Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and twice as Nigeria’s Finance Minister — the first woman to hold either post. She has held several key positions at the World Bank, and in 2014, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Currently, […]
Addressing Social Norms to Stop Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in Factories and Farms
“The workload is tremendous here. They swear at us when we fail to complete the work. … They scold. They say, ‘Hey you! Daughter of a bitch, daughter of a pig! How come so much work has been piled up?’ …At such times I feel really bad. … I cannot stand this. I cry. I […]
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 […]
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 […]
What Role Can Business Play in the Pursuit of Peace? Summary Thoughts
Business Fights Poverty hosted a month-long conference on the topic of the role businesses can play in the pursuit of peace. A subject little discussed twenty years ago, this has become a vibrant topic and the October event was a time and place to pause and reflect on this question. The conference welcomed those who […]
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. […]
The Peace Attributes of Companies (PACO) index
Given the growth and maturity of the field of business and peace, in this article we call for the creation of an index that would present a scorecard of company behaviors. We call this the PACO index, which is an acronym for Peaceful Attributes of Companies and is the word for peace in Esperanto. We […]
Operationalizing Peace through Commerce
Most scholars would agree that the goal of business is to create value. Yet, can there be anything more valuable than peace? My article tackles the following research question: How can, or do, businesses advance peace? It explains why peace through commerce is a topic worthy of study and sets out an empirical approach to […]
Can and should enlightened global businesses solve real global problems like war and poverty?
World headlines show the global community is faced with serious problems of conflict and instability: 10,000 or more deaths per year from the Mexican Drug War, Syrian Civil War, Iraqi Insurgency, and ethnic violence in South Sudan. 1,000-9,999 deaths per year in Gaza and from civil wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Northwest Pakistan, Egypt, and […]
Employers are Getting Graduates Job-ready in Africa
It is widely recognised that long-term economic growth can only be achieved through investment in a highly skilled workforce, and more than three-quarters of CEOs in Africa believe a skilled, educated and adaptable workforce should be a priority for business.[1] However, employers across the region complain of a lack of basic, technical and transferable skills […]
U.S. Technology Companies, Sovereign States, and the Battle Over Data Protection
Who owns an individual’s electronic communications data, who should have access to it, and what can be done with it? The battle of privacy versus security is currently raging between U.S. technology companies and national security forces. U.S. technology companies are adopting corporate foreign policies to respond to sovereign states’ efforts to access customer data, […]
Business and Cyber Peace – We Need You!
Rarely does a day seem to go by without another front page story about a firm being breached by cyber-attackers. Even experts in the field are far from immune from the unsustainable status quo. For example, Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has said: ‘‘We have a faith-based approach [to cybersecurity], […]