Bringing Sustainable Energy to Informal Settlements
Pollinate Energy is a Finalist in the Unilever Global Development Award supported by Business Fights Poverty. We asked them some questions about their programme and the lessons learnt. Q) What challenge does Pollinate Energy’s programme serve to change? 400 million people live in India without electricity. Wood cooking fires and kerosene lamps cause epidemic levels […]
Catalysing Impact Investing in East Africa
FSG’s newest office, located in Mumbai, houses our inclusive markets team, which works to develop and scale inclusive business models to create new opportunities and better lives for the global poor. Learn more about our inclusive markets approach. While East Africa has demonstrated robust growth over the past years, poverty is still widespread. Across the […]
Unilever Global Development Award Finalists Announced
The Annual Business in the Community Awards programme today has announced the finalists of the Unilever Global Development Award, supported by Business Fights Poverty. The Award celebrates businesses that are embedding Global Development and the principles of the MDGs into their business models. 2015 marked the conclusion of the MDGs which have now evolved into […]
Sustainability Critical to Future Business Growth
Leading companies increasingly recognize the importance of embedding sustainability into their business models. However, professionals seeking sustainability outcomes face certain barriers. Return-on-investment rules are a long-standing challenge, and overcoming them requires positive engagement with finance teams. Presenting a strong business case is another key challenge, requiring creative work across the organization and often with external […]
5 Reasons Social Enterprises are Applying a Gender Lens
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Acumen There is article after article about why businesses and investors should seek new ways to be more inclusive of women in their business models. But what we’ve learned at Acumen, where we invest in business that solve problems of poverty, is that leaders of social-purpose businesses are already doing this, […]
Investing in Social Enterprise to Fight Poverty
Rupert Scofield will be speaking at a dinner hosted by Women Advancing Microfinance UK on Tuesday 10th May in London. He will talk to us about the work FINCA does and the impact it’s having, in particular in the social enterprise and innovation space. Tickets to the event are available here. Ahead of the event, […]
Transcending Boundaries to Fight Climate Change
Climate change is now at the forefront of the policy agenda. The Paris climate talks have ushered a new wave of urgency; the goal is to decarbonise the world by the second half of the century and try to remain below the 1.5-degree threshold. But in order to ensure this happens, we need everyone’s input. […]
Helping People Lead Healthy Lives
Last year saw the release of the much referenced Lancet report Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health. Published prior to COP 21 in Paris, the report considered the impacts of climate change on public health and estimates that cutting carbon emissions could reduce 500,000 premature deaths a year from air pollution […]
2016 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship
Kicking off this week’s 13th Annual Skoll World Forum, we are pleased to announce the six recipients of the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll Awards distinguish transformative leaders whose organizations are disrupting the status quo, driving large-scale “equilibrium” change, and are poised to create even greater impact on the world. This year’s […]
More Space Technology Can Be a Key to Poverty Reduction
In 2004, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the robot probe Philae, with great ambition and hope, to learn about the origins of our Solar System. Human genius overcame the challenges of gravity, space and budget constraints in the name of scientific discovery. For 10 years, Philae travelled through space, to eventually reach its destination […]
Connecting Corporations and Social Enterprises
By Sheena Raikundalia, Senior Consultant, Intellecap Kenya-focused entrepreneur Moka Lantum, Founder and Managing Director of Microclinics, is preparing for pitch to a large pharmaceutical company. The Nairobi-based healthcare management company provides patient and clinic management systems to peri-urban and rural clinics. The software developed by his company, tracks commodities in clinics and enhances, availability, accessibility, […]
Design Thinking and Solar Power for BOP Markets
In Africa, two-thirds of the population is without access to electricity. To fuel economic growth and empower people to become more productive with their lives, governments, business, and the nonprofit sector have been working on providing people across the continent with solar energy. While progress has been made, many obstacles and barriers remain. Besides the […]
iDE: Reaching 20 Million More People
Since 1983 iDE has leveraged the power of business to help rural entrepreneurs work their way out of poverty. From our first social enterprise in Somalia to our more recent businesses from Vietnam to Latin America, we have helped more than 23 million people gain access to a technology or service. We strive for tangible, […]
Why Renewable Energy Matters: What Your Business Can Do
Around a quarter of all carbon emissions come from electricity generation, and almost half of that is used by businesses. Following COP21 in Paris, where 195 countries agreed to keep global mean temperature rise 2 degrees below pre industrialised levels, the call for businesses to invest in renewable energy has never been so strong. Experts […]
Introducing a New Database on Inclusive Business
If you search Google for ‘inclusive business’ you get 46.5 million results in under a second. But it would take you years to get through them. And if I search for inclusive business solar, or inclusive business models, or inclusive business Malawi, you find some good stuff and some not. So what would you do […]
Corporate Impact Venturing at the BOP
The base of the global economic pyramid (BoP) comprises 4 billion people and represents a $5 trillion USD market opportunity. Both corporates and entrepreneurs recognize this large and growing opportunity. Both struggle to realize it. Corporate Impact Venturing allows them to complement each other’s weaknesses and reinforce their strengths. Together, they can reach the scale […]
Understanding and Tracking Social Impacts of Business
2015 was a year of progress. We have a long way to go to understand, track and strengthen the social impact of business. But we are beginning to ask the right questions and shape better tools. In case you missed them, these are my top highlights of 2015 for building the impact measurement space for […]
Pay As You Go Solar Distribution
Today, more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are living without access to electricity, most of them in rural areas. This is due largely to the high cost of expanding grid infrastructure to poor and remote locations. Access to sustainable off-grid energy in Africa has drawn an enormous amount of attention from donors, activists […]
Enabling SME Adaptation to Climate Change
Ismail Faisov tends a farm in the mountainous Dashtijum Jamoat region in Tajikistan. Dashtijum Jamoat is rich with indigenous fruits and legumes that have become naturally resilient to drought, cold weather, diseases, and other environmental stresses. For a number of reasons though, Ismail did not cultivate these traditional species, choosing instead to sell imported cultivars […]
Why I’m Optimistic About Climate Change
Only a few days into the UN climate summit, and it is already time to sing the Paris blues. The path to Paris was, unfortunately, paved with pessimism and imperfect accords: Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen. In the meantime, carbon dioxide in the air has increased, raising the world’s average temperature by one degree Celsius relative to […]