NGO Partnerships Give Businesses the Teeth to Be Social Activists
Let’s start with the obvious: your average ice cream company doesn’t have much to say about the refugee crisis in Europe. Equally obvious: Ben & Jerry’s is not your average ice cream company. We mix activism and a social mission in with our famous chunks and swirls. And we know that to drive real change, […]
Leveraging the Power of Skillanthropy
A conversation with Marco Ambrosio, North America Growth Strategist for SapientRazorfish. Javier Guerrero of Happy Punk Panda, a Salvadoran digital media company, came to New York through Bpeace’s Fast Runner Program. His top request? To meet with the top digital agencies includingSapientRazorfish. How did SapientRazorfish become a Bpeace Host Company? Before I came to SapientRazorfish, […]
A Paradigm Shift
By Stephanie Manciagli, Specialist of International Replicas for the Poverty Stoplight at Fundación Paraguaya Since the onset of the new millennium, there have been tremendous evolutions in human welfare. During the last two decades, development theories and strategies taken by international actors have integrated lessons learned from previous decades, recycling the themes that worked and […]
Boldline Accelerator: Bringing Partnerships to Life and Scale
Did you ever have a good idea but felt it was too large to undertake yourself? Not sure how to bring it to life? Or have you had a successful pilot program that you knew had the potential to expand and even more meaningfully advance foreign policy imperatives? Welcome to the Boldline Accelerator for Public-Private […]
Q&A with MCC Resident Country Director for Niger: Bolstering Niger’s Agricultural Sector
In July 2016, MCC signed a $437 million compact with the Government of Niger to improve access to water for agriculture and livestock and expand access to markets. In this interview, MCC Resident Country Director for Niger Kristin Penn discusses how, together with the Government of Niger, MCC is building stronger institutions and making foundational […]
Why Do So Few Companies Invest in Gender Equality?
Businesses that invest in gender equality often see notable returns. Take Banco BHD León (BHDL) for example in the Dominical Republic. In the bank’s home market, women make up 70 percent of university graduates and more than half of all primary household providers but remain underserved in the financial sector. By targeting women’s specific needs […]
Training and Support for Women Refugees
Interview with Mandana Hendessi, Iraq Country Director at Women for Women International Mandana Hendessi will be speaking at a dinner hosted by Women Advancing Microfinance UK on Tuesday 2nd May 2017 in London. She will be talking about the work that Women for Women International (WfWi) and its partners are doing in and around refugee […]
Co-Creating Partnerships to Achieve the Global Goals
With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) having significantly raised the bar regarding ambition and universality, there is agreement that we have to go well beyond business as usual. Achieving breakthrough progress in these rapidly-changing times requires a new mind-set and different behavior from all of us. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not […]
Delivering the SDGs through Ethical Trade
ETI’s newest guide on ethical trade and the SDGs shows how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are relevant to ethical trade and workers’ rights, particularly SDG8 on decent work and sustainable development, as well as other key goals. It also sets out the relationship between the SDGs, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human […]
The Year Ahead and the Need to Rethink Collaboration
2016 convinced me of the need to collaborate more deeply than ever: to deliver on the bold future envisioned in the new Sustainable Development Goals; to protect past progress made towards equality—now threatened by the politics of division; to tackle the deep social exclusion that has at least in part driven the political turbulence of […]
Top 10 Discussions of 2016
2016 saw our 100th online discussion, with over 1,300 comments posted over the course of the year! Online discussions have played a central role in our new Challenges as a way for members to share insights on the Challenge question. From next year, we will be upgrading our discussion forum to make it easier to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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], […]
Interviews with the 2015 Business for Peace Honorees
Ethical leadership can lead to many positive organizational outcomes. Previous studies have shown a correlation between ethical conduct and profitability; in addition, firms that have high ethical standards have fewer legal issues. The existing ethical leadership literature assumes a stable external environment. The business and peace literature, on the other hand, assumes instability but has […]
Improving Learning for Syrian and host community children and youth in the Middle East
How does a company make a meaningful impact in addressing a major societal challenge? How do we leverage our core expertise and capabilities, and do so in a sustainable way that doesn’t fade away as the media turns its attention to the next big crisis? Over the past couple of years we’ve given this a […]
Coca-Cola’s Contribution to Stability, Growth, and Optimism
In my article, I review the role of a global commercial organization, The Coca-Cola Company, in contributing to national stability in developing markets through a strategic approach to social and economic contribution. The company’s initiatives complement the role of policymakers, who are primarily responsible for the safety and prosperity of citizens, often using the Golden […]