A New Approach to Sustainable Global Development
By Mark Stafford Smith, Future Earth There is no escaping the fact that our world is changing fast. A global population of 11 billion by the year 2100. ‘Severe and irreversible’ climate change. Demand for efficient renewable energy sources and more sustainable consumption. Escalating concerns for food and water security. How can science, policy and […]
IFC’s New Report on Inclusive Business
About 4.5 billion people in developing countries are low-income, living on $81 a day or less. They are the so-called base of the economic pyramid and constitute a $5 trillion consumer market. However, the success of local businesses has often been lost in the discussion of ‘BOP business’ to date. While case studies abound on […]
M4D: Addressing The Infrastructure Access Gap
Women fetching water near Tambacounda, Eastern Senegal The GSMA and DFID announced on the 20th of October that an additional £6 million in funding has been provided by DFID to extend the GSMA’s work to improve energy, water and sanitation, as part of its newly branded Mobile for Development Utilities programme. The programme builds on […]
Contribute to the Fight Against Ebola with Bitcoin
In times of global crisis, we often find that humanity demonstrates compassion, offering support in cash, time and expertise. Those on the frontlines fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa are our modern-day heroes, selflessly exposing themselves to potential danger in the throes of the fight. These heroes need financial support, and more importantly, they […]
Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Rashid is a farmer I met in the Marangu region around Kilimanjaro, like his father and grandfather as well as the thousands of other farmers in the region he farms coffee, bananas and a variety of other vegetables. With declining crop prices, the income he earns from these crops is negligible and most of his […]
Enabling Frameworks for Social and Green Enterprises
Over the last four years SEED has hosted a series of unique multi-stakeholder for a focussed on the Green Economy and Africa – the SEED Symposia – where each year innovative and promising start-up enterprises, that won a SEED Award for their remarkable efforts to address social and environmental challenges at the grassroots, are presented. […]
How a New Breed of Multinationals Can Root Out Poverty
The number of people now living on $2 a day or less is greater than the world’s total population in 1950, when the global fight against poverty began. Only business can marshal the resources (human and financial) and the incentives (profits and wages) to address this tragic reality at scale, and sustain the effort for […]
A Call for Smarter Giving and a Harmony Among Donors
It was Albert Einstein who once said that insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He could well have been talking about today’s technology-for-development (ICT4D) community, which has a habit of trying the same things over and over again in the hope that someone might eventually get it […]
Financing for Humanitarian Action
Monika Vrsanska/CAFOD Visioning the Future: Future Humanitarian Financing is bringing together experts from Business and Private Sector to explore new approaches to meet the financial costs of responding to crises such as the Pakistan Floods. CAFOD, World Vision and the Food and Agriculture Organization have been tasked by the Inter-Agency Standing Team in Geneva to […]
We Need to Talk About Toilets
You visit the toilet about six to eight times a day on average 2,500 times a year. This amounts to three years of your life spent sitting on a toilet. If you are lucky. If you are not one of the two and a half billion people in the world unable to access adequate sanitation. […]
Partnerships for Good Growth: Improving Crop Efficiency
Vegetables and Specialty Crops, Syngenta We all know that, globally, our population is growing. To put it into perspective, we are adding over 200,000 people to our planet every day. The good news is that infant mortality is down to the lowest rate in history in many countries, and many people are living longer, fuller […]
Technologies and Services for the Base of the Pyramid
, FUNDACIÓN CODESPA In recent years, innovative inclusive economic development strategies have been explored by development agencies, NGOs and business sector. This path has led to the consideration of the poorest and most vulnerable population, the so-called Base of the Pyramid (BoP), as a huge collective with capacity to generate economic dynamics and assume a […]
Implementing a Transformative Development Agenda
In September 2015, the international community is expected to agree an ambitious post-2015 development agenda (the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aiming to combine economic, social and environmental objectives in a balanced manner. At the same time there will be a financing for development conference in Addis Ababa in […]
Three Things You Should Know About Broadband
In the past year, MIT and NASA have been working hard to make broadband connectivity available on the moon. The results have been so positive that your connectivity on the moon is actually better than in many countries on Earth, including the United States. And this same year, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, created internet.org, […]
An Evolving Relationship between NGOs and Private Businesses
A common misperception regarding NGO-private sector relations is one based on mutual distrust and occasional confrontation, or with the advent of corporate social responsibility funding, one solely based on donor-recipient transactions. With the international development landscape rapidly evolving, some historical and present-day assumptions are simply inaccurate. The following statements are NOT true of operational U.S. […]
Women’s and Children’s Health and the SDGs
By Next year, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) — a set of even more ambitious targets for global development. In a bold attempt to create the healthiest generation of young women and children in the world, the new SDGs will require the near elimination of preventable […]
Integrating Trade in the Post-2015 Development Agenda
Trade must be a prominent part of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, given its importance in structural economic transformation. The SDGs could help tackle some of the trade challenges facing African LDCs by moving beyond the agenda of market access. This would imply a focus on addressing behind-the-border measures, such as rules of origin, enforcement […]
USAID Promotes Inclusive Business for Development Goals
The Business Call to Action interviews Ricardo Michel, Director, Centre for Transformational Partnerships, US Global Development Lab at USAID Ricardo Michel is responsible for the overall strategic direction to best use local and global public-private partnerships for accelerated sustainable development. Previously, Michel served as acting director for the Office of Innovation and Development Alliances, where […]
Overcoming Barriers to Internet Connectivity
The Business Call to Action interviews Abdullah Orkun Kaya, CEO of TTNET TTNET was founded in 2006 and has become one of Turkey’s leading internet companies. The company plays a pioneering role in the communications industry with its mix of digital products and services, and also in developing responsible business models. Offering a combination of […]
Running the Numbers, and Having a Transformative Impact
Children attending school in the elements of Africa without shelter, electricity or modern teaching tools Over the last 30 years I have found it useful to constantly and obsessively “Run the Numbers” when I look at any business opportunity. I try to do this in a way that quickly strikes to the heart of any […]