Eight Steps to the Four A's of Food Security
The potential of African agriculture is undoubtedly bright, but it will take more than just encouraging investment from large scale agri-players – of which Olam is one – into the continent. Food security depends on the four As – the essential combination of availability (is there enough), accessibility (in the right place), affordability (for the […]
Eight Steps to the Four A’s of Food Security
The potential of African agriculture is undoubtedly bright, but it will take more than just encouraging investment from large scale agri-players – of which Olam is one – into the continent. Food security depends on the four As – the essential combination of availability (is there enough), accessibility (in the right place), affordability (for the […]
How We Can Help Smallholders Feed the World
The world’s population is expected to number more than 9 billion people by 2050, and to feed them agriculture will have to grow by 60%. It’s an expansion that can only be fuelled by investment – to the tune of $83 billion. Growth generated by agriculture is up to four times more effective at reducing […]
Lifting the Game in Sustainable Reporting
With the start of a new year, it is usually a time for people to reflect on the year that has passed, draw lessons from it so that they can improve themselves in the coming year. For sustainability practitioners, and advocacy evangelisers like myself, it is also an opportunity for us to review the year […]
Enhancing Vital Goods and Services Provided by Nature
25 years ago you’d have been hard pressed to find anyone in a company who thought that nature had anything to do with their business. We thought that nature would pollinate, control crop pests and disease and would continue to provide plentiful water and rich soil – all free of charge. But with rapid industrialisation […]
Transcending Boundaries for Global Food Security
In just 25 years, Olam International has gone from a single-country, single-commodity company to a fully integrated global agribusiness firm operating in 65 countries. This growth is a true reflection of the meanings of the word ‘olam’, which is alternatively translated from old Hebrew to mean ‘transcending boundaries’, ‘the world’ and ‘timeless’. These definitions also […]
Global Health: 3 Good News Stories From 2014
When the calendar turned to 1 January, who could have imagined 2014 would be quite such a tumultuous year for global health. The outbreak of Ebola virus, which emerged in February this year, continues to rage across West Africa and has killed more than 6,000 people. No one yet knows when it will end, but […]
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 […]
How will you Step Forward in 2015?
Friday 5 December marks International Volunteer Day and to coincide with this, VSO is launching a new global campaign inviting people to pledge to #StepForward and raise the profile of volunteering for development in 2015. This campaign builds on recent research conducted by VSO and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) demonstrating that ‘human-capital’ is […]
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 […]
Cambodia: Growing Momentum for Sanitation
By KC Koch, iDE WASH Communications Manager On a Sunday morning, rural villagers gather in the village meetinghouse. A respected member of the local commune committee calls for the group’s attention. She leads them in games and stimulates lively conversations about proper sanitation. People wave fans in the air decorated with colorful photographs and consult […]
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 […]
Emerge 2014 – Living with Purpose, and Other Highlights
Great minds from all reaches of the social entrepreneurship realm came together at Said Business School this weekend for an intensive, 2-day conference to discuss some of the arena’s most pressing insights, developments and issues. Lead by Oxford’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, in conjunction with Student Hubs, this year’s Emerge Conference saw several major […]
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. […]
Closing the Information Gap on Impact Investment
Information, as they say, is power. Nowhere is this truer than in business and finance. Most new business ventures will involve an element of risk or a leap of faith. However, the better calculated that risk, or the more accurately measured the leap, the better the chance of success. Which is why, the Impact Programme, […]
A Roadmap for the Base of the Pyramid Domain
More than ever, business and market-based approaches in general are seen as critical parts of the solution to global poverty. Governments, NGOs and businesses – from startups to multinationals – have largely accepted this premise. Now, it is time to start talking more about how we, as a sector, can collectively share – and debate […]
The Nutritional Value of Toilets
“Don’t ever, ever eat in the toilet!” When I grew up I imagined every mother in the world admonished her children with this warning. If you’ve grown up hearing this message, as so many children in middle and high income countries have, you simply cannot think of food and toilets in the same sentence without […]
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 […]