In Benin, Young Entrepreneurs are Tackling the Plastic Problem
The room is unassuming, with pale blue walls and sunlight that filters in from the open door. Inside, Babatundé Oguidi meticulously arranges biodegradable bags and boxes on a large wooden table. A massive chalkboard covers one wall, filled with a seemingly endless list of new and completed orders. On the opposite wall, the company’s mission […]
To Boldly Go Where We’ve Not Been Before Doesn’t Need to be a Leap of Faith
Sometimes the future is not hard to predict – it’s totally logical. Widely cited, Star Trek’s Chief of Logic (COL), Spock nailed it when he said that “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” If we are bold and if we act now to change our organisations and our systems we […]
Business as Usual – Or Business with Purpose?
While the debate on business’ social and environmental impacts (both positive and negative) is not new, when the CEO of Blackrock, one of the world’s largest investors, and the head of Oxfam International are both talking about the potential for business to help achieve inclusive and sustainable development, it feels like we’re at a tipping […]
Practical Action and the IKEA Foundation: Can Small Holder Farming Really Work for Some of the World’s Poorest?
Practical Action and the IKEA Foundation have launched a new partnership. Worth €6.4 million, the partnership will help rural people in Kenya earn a decent income from farming. Together, we want to break the cycle of poverty in rural communities. In the Lake Victoria basin of Kenya, farming is the main source of income for […]
Water-Wise Coffee: Making Sustainable Business Profitable in Ethiopia
Community members in the Aleta Wondo district of southern Ethiopia had a problem on their doorstep: their river was polluted. The students of Habaja Primary School, built on its banks, complained about the river’s smell and that they couldn’t use it for gathering water or washing. Their parents in the surrounding communities also struggled, as […]
Fashion has a Huge Waste Problem. Here’s How it Can Change
The biggest trends in fashion today are ones no one wants to be seen in. They include vastly increased clothing production and declining use, massive levels of waste and more greenhouse gas emissions than international shipping and flights combined. In the last 15 years the industry has doubled production, while the time clothing is worn […]
WE SOLVE: A Unique Partnership Creates Jobs for Women and Breaks the Barriers to Clean Energy
The Arusha region is home to Tanzania’s nomadic Maasai and other communities who farm and herd in the plains around Mount Meru. Communities here face life without light as soon as the sun sets, meaning that kids can’t play in the streets or study and families are often dependent on expensive and toxic fuel-powered resources […]
We Learned Simple Ways to Improve the Local Environment and Our Income
In the Nawa region in Côte d’Ivoire, Mondelēz International’s Cocoa Life partners with Impactum and CARE International to engage women and address climate change and deforestation through a Green Entrepreneurship pilot project. They are helping women learn the knowledge and skills needed to create a sustainable future for cocoa farming communities, and generate income for […]
Forests, Farmers and Cococa: Getting the Balance Right
The world needs forests. They are vital to maintain biodiversity and to help combat climate change. At the same time, forests have suffered since the invention of the plough, as people have cut them down to plant crops for food and cash. The bulldozer just made things worse. Over 70% of the world’s cocoa comes […]
Claims, Credibility and Landscape Approaches
The idea is a compelling one. Rather than looking at individual sites, suppliers or sectors, these approaches recognize that issues like deforestation, habitat conversion, land rights and rural development are often best addressed at a larger scale – across whole landscapes or jurisdictions. Bringing together all stakeholders – producers, sourcing companies, governments, civil society, NGOs, […]
Spearheading Change within the Chocolate Industry to Protect the Forests where Cocoa is Grown
At Mondelēz, we know that real lasting change for the better can only happen via cross-sector collaboration and commitment. That’s why, as a founding member of the Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI), we are leading the way with ambitious action plans and calling on the industry to do the same, in order to protect and […]
Seven Key Learnings for Corporate Partnership Leads in 2019
At the end of last year, WWF and Tesco announced they would be joining forces in a four year partnership to deliver affordable, healthy, sustainable food with a shared goal to half the environmental impact of the average shopping basket. Working together they will be focusing on three key areas of activity: Helping customers eat […]
How Root Capital and the IKEA Foundation are Building the Resilience of Smallholder Farmers in East Africa
Root Capital and the IKEA Foundation are announcing a new partnership, worth €4.8 million, to help 260,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda increase their income and adapt to climate change. The grant builds on the success of a previous partnership, through which Root Capital supported dozens of Kenyan agricultural businesses, helping them break the […]
Towards Solving the SDG’s Funding Gap: UNEP FI’s Positive Impact Initiative
UNEP FI’s Positive Impact Initiative proposes a new approach: social, economic and environmental impacts have an as-yet under explored potential to generate financial revenues: impact-based business models can be developed, with the delivery of positive impacts as a driver of sustainable business growth and long-term enterprise value. This could be game-changing: by making it cheaper […]
Building Scalable and Self-Sustaining Safe Water Enterprises
Imagine a life without safe drinking water. It isn’t easy. Most of us take for granted that we can just turn on a tap and fill a glass. But that’s not an option for roughly one in four of the world’s population — the 2.1 billion people who still lack access to safe drinking water […]
Walking Beyond Tokenism
I am so moved by the heart wrenching impact of climate change across the globe, where women were hit first, worst and hardest. It made me question my own personal responsibility. I was, as always inspired by Mahathma Gandhi, as to what he said about “being the change you want see to in the world”. […]
The Road of Change: Circular Economy in the Automotive Industry
To tell you the story of Kaiho Sangyo, I must first give you a short introduction to the circumstances in the very beginning. In 1969, before returning to Kanazawa, my beloved hometown in Japan, I worked at a dismantling company in Tokyo for three years. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Japan has been a world […]
Investing In The Energy Transition
Innovators and entrepreneurs are working to speed up the transition towards clean and renewable energy sources, but many of the innovative clean energy projects have trouble raising the finance to turn their ideas into reality. This was the case for ATEC, a social enterprise in Cambodia which has developed appropriate technology to address the health […]
Why Retailers are Uniting to Tackle Climate Change
The products we can buy today may not be available to us in the future unless action is taken to address the most pressing global challenges facing us. Take a simple cotton shirt for example. Cotton production is being hit by environmental impacts such as climate change and water scarcity, social challenges in production such […]
SDGs: What Part Do Forests Play?
Deemed as the ‘lungs of the planet’ and covering 30% of the earth’s surface, forests are essential to supporting all life on Earth. Not only do forests provide a wide array of ecosystem services, such as absorbing greenhouse gases and regulating water quality, there are also over a billion people who depend on forests for […]