Paul Polak: Achieving Success at the BoP
Question: If you build a better mousetrap will the world beat a path to your door? Answer: Without superb marketing and distribution nobody beats a path to your door. In my work with a multitude of affordable technologies over the past 30 years, one key feature has become abundantly clear: If you have met the […]
Marius Kokouvi: A Day in the Life of a Microfinance Loan Officer
Marius Kokouvi is a loan officer at WAGES*, lendwithcare.org’s partner microfinance institution (MFI) in Togo. Here he describes an average working day. My name is Marius YAKOUTO Kokouvi. For 3 years, I have been responsible for saving and loans at WAGES at the Atakpamé branch, which is in central Togo. My job is to connect […]
Top Resources of 2012
Whether you seek practical tools for entrepreneurs, or an overview of how inclusive businesses are grappling towards scale, there has been plenty for everyone in the highlights of 2012. On the Practitioner Hub on Inclusive Business we feature an Editor’s Choice every month. I have spent an enjoyable morning going back through the highlights of […]
My top picks of 2012
Whether you seek practical tools for entrepreneurs, or an overview of how inclusive businesses are grappling towards scale, there has been plenty for everyone in the highlights of 2012. On the Practitioner Hub on Inclusive Business we feature an Editor’s Choice every month. I have spent an enjoyable morning going back through the highlights of […]
Has the debate on microfinance made us forget about the poor?
Ines ©Nancy Thomas/CARE The microfinance community can be a confusing and contradictory place. Ever growing and buzzing, it is a community built upon grand ‘for’ and ‘against’ statements, a place that is bursting at the seams with facts and figures and a place, let’s face it, that leaves even the most persistent of ‘truth-seekers’ feeling […]
There is a Case for NGO Corporate Partnerships for Development Through Inclusive Business
Private Sector Engagement Coordinator, CARE Bangladesh Over the last ten years, as an integral part of CARE’s mission to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh, we have been engaging with the private sector more and more to identify and implement innovative solutions to the most pressing development challenges of our time. To our private sector partners, we […]
Business-NGO partnerships: not why, but how….
For some time now many of us have woken up to the fact that there is more to business-NGO partnerships than money. Money, of course, remains important in these economically tight times – NGOs certainly need all the money they can get at the moment and it’s great to see corporate philanthropy remains strong. We […]
Michael Mapstone: Business-NGO partnerships – not why, but how….
For some time now many of us have woken up to the fact that there is more to business-NGO partnerships than money. Money, of course, remains important in these economically tight times – NGOs certainly need all the money they can get at the moment and it’s great to see corporate philanthropy remains strong. We […]
To Make HIV/AIDS Education More Effective, Start with Empowerment
While in Kenya this month, I sat in on a HERproject training on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for future peer health educators. BSR’s HERproject uses a peer-to-peer training methodology to reach women working in factories and farms in Asia and Africa—to date, we’ve reached more than 200,000 women across eight countries. The training was the […]
Waste Is Wanted: Feeding the Hungry Instead of Landfills
The need for proper nutrition is among the most primal. Yet in our own country, one in seven homes and one in five children in the United States are labeled as food At the same time, food waste is also epidemic. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United States throws out 40 percent […]
Brussels event looks at ways to engage private sector in sustainable agricultural development
European Development Days, an annual event hosted by the European Commission and held in the Belgian capital, Brussels, is Europe’s premier forum on development and international affairs. In 2012, the meetings addressed inclusive growth, resilience, and private sector engagement, with a special focus on new partnerships and innovative financing of anti-poverty solutions. One high-level panel […]
THE LAST 500 FEET
By Paul Polak, Founder, iDE, Author Out of Poverty Developing new practical and profitable ways to cross the last 500 feet to the remote rural places where poor families now live and work is the first step towards creating vibrant new markets that serve poor customers. In rural Orissa, India, the women are not permitted […]
Paul Polak: The Last 500 Feet
By Paul Polak, Founder, iDE, Author Out of Poverty Developing new practical and profitable ways to cross the last 500 feet to the remote rural places where poor families now live and work is the first step towards creating vibrant new markets that serve poor customers. In rural Orissa, India, the women are not permitted […]
Working Towards Responsible Labour Standards for Cocoa Growing
Child labour is both a symptom and a self-perpetuating cause of poverty. Children in cocoa growing areas often face the harsh realities of rural poverty (including scarcity or low-fertility of land, food insecurity, lack of education infrastructure, poor access to potable water, and remoteness from markets). The practice of children working on cocoa farms is […]
IFC’s “Being the Change”: Exploring the Personal Side of Inclusive Business
One usually thinks of the International Finance Corporation as a hard-nosed investor – an unlikely source of inspiration. Yes, IFC is a development institution whose purpose is “to create opportunity for people to escape poverty and improve their lives.” Yes, it is one of the largest investors in the world in companies with inclusive business […]
The BIG Smallholder Opportunity
By Dian Hollman, Program Officer, GIZ and Christina Gradl, Founder and Managing Director, Endeva Over the past few years, agriculture has returned to the center stage of the development agenda – particularly as price fluctuations and demographic growth aggravate the challenge of food security. A staggering 870 million people, 12 percent of the world’s population, […]
2012 Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value winner announced and 2014 call for nominations launched
We have recently announced the winner of our 2012 Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Valueat our annual Global Creating Shared Value Forum in New Delhi, India. So what is the Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value? Every two years up to three innovative schemes related to water, nutrition or rural development are selected for the […]
The Promise of Measuring Shared Value
Can something simultaneously be both a cliché and an emergent, nascent approach? Consider corporate approaches to working with smallholder farmers. This is fairly mainstream thinking in international development. We hear these examples at every conference and in every report on agricultural development. Companies create shared value by helping improve yields of critical crops such as […]
Building an inclusive businessmovement in the Asia-Pacific
How can corporate Australia do more to address global poverty? This was the question that in 2006 brought together a group of leading and progressive Australian companies, and soon after, led to the formation of Business for Millennium Development (previously named Business for Poverty Relief Alliance). Founded as a collaboration between government, business and charity, […]
Crowding to a Cause
Crowdfunding is generally defined as an internet-based collective effort between people who pool money to help fund an activity or an entrepreneurial endeavor. Also called crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is used to underwrite a variety of activities, including new products, artistic efforts, political campaigns or scientific research, just to name a few. In return, if a product […]