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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Promoting Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development
Marquard, SEED On 20 April, ten years ago, five start-up entrepreneurs from Bolivia, Cambodia, Madagascar, Nepal and Nigeria travelled to New York to attend the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). They were to receive the first SEED Awards for their innovative approaches to advance sustainable development at the grassroots. Little did they – […]
Investment in Mining, Opportunities for Farmers?
One sunny morning I’m talking to Mr Kimono Wendo, a Congolese refugee and farmer living in Meheba Refugee Settlement in the North-Western Province of Zambia. Mr Kimono tells me of his 17 year struggle to provide food for his family by growing maize in the rainy season and small patches of vegetables in the dry […]
Using the Right Language for Each Stage of Growth
Counterfeit products cause huge social problems—estimates suggest that counterfeit tuberculosis and malaria drugs alone cause approximately 700,000 deaths each year—and Sproxil takes a business approach to solve them. Our Mobile Product AuthenticationTM solution can verify the authenticity of almost any product. A sticker with a unique code hidden under a scratch-off layer is applied to […]
What Is the Best Way to Measure Innovation?
Commenting on the state of innovativeness, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and legendary Silicon Valley investor, remarked, “We asked for flying cars. Instead, we got a hundred and forty characters.” Really, Peter? Who asked for flying cars? Silicon Valley is, of course, obsessed with cars of many kinds – self-driven, electric, enabled by commands and […]
Interview with Kamal Quadir, CEO of bKash, Bangladesh
Katie Allen interviews Kamal Quadir, CEO of bKash, mobile money provider in Bangladesh. Q1: Many of us have heard of the M-Pesa phenomenon that achieved great success in East Africa, but bKash remains under the radar. How is BKash different from other mobile money providers? Kamal Quadir: In terms of customer experience, bKash is no […]
Donors’ New Role in the Fight Against Poverty
A remarkable thing happened over the past two decades: the world grew richer, freer, and more secure than ever before. The end of the Cold War in 1991 was a seminal event not least because it ushered in these trends. Democratic governance has flourished in many countries where a mere 20 years earlier repression and […]
An IFC Perspective on Sustainable Sugar Production
As mentioned in Business Fights Poverty and the CSR Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s recent report on building blocks for sustainable sugar production at scale, IFC has been engaged in sustainable sugar activities since the early 2000s, when we collaborated with WWF to develop better management practices for tropical commodities such as sugar. In […]
Women are the Crux of Africa’s Development
Recent estimates state that women provide approximately 70 per cent of agricultural labour and produce about 90 per cent of all food in Africa. At the same time, women and girls reinvest an average of 90 percent of their income in their families, compared to 30 to 40 percent for men. It is clear that […]
Africa's Digital Revolution
Just over 20 years ago, Robert Kaplan wrote a stark warning about the mounting strategic danger posed by an anarchic, uncontrollable, “increasing lawlessness” in West Africa. He argued that a sort of ‘criminal anarchy’ was emerging as a major strategic danger. Six years later, the Economist ran an editorial naming Africa ‘the Hopeless Continent’, claiming […]
Africa’s Digital Revolution
Just over 20 years ago, Robert Kaplan wrote a stark warning about the mounting strategic danger posed by an anarchic, uncontrollable, “increasing lawlessness” in West Africa. He argued that a sort of ‘criminal anarchy’ was emerging as a major strategic danger. Six years later, the Economist ran an editorial naming Africa ‘the Hopeless Continent’, claiming […]
Achieving Scale and Impact Supporting Small Businesses
Earlier this week, to mark Global Partnerships Week, Business Fights Poverty and the CSR Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School released a new case study on the partnership between SABMiller, the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and FUNDES to empower 190,000 small-scale retailers in Latin America by 2020. Called 4e Camino […]
Co-Creating Solutions to Get Every Child Learning
Edtech companies are in the business of building bridges — providing new tools, models, and pathways that look to improve education, whether it’s through innovative business models or new delivery platforms that can effectively reach learners at scale. Pearson is excited to continue in that vein in our new partnership with Save the Children called […]
Putting Enterprise at the Heart of the Post-2015 Agenda
The international community is busy defining a new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” that will shape the agenda when the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire later this year. One striking improvement is the emphasis being placed on inclusive growth, jobs and enterprise. And in that context it is encouraging to see the draft SDGs […]
Empowering Small Retailers at Scale
Latin America is an important region for SABMiller’s growth strategy. Small-scale retailers, called “tenderos,” are critical to our business there. These retailers are located close to their customers in environments that are difficult for “big box” stores to serve. They let customers with low and unpredictable incomes, no transportation, and no storage space at home […]