CARE, Cargill and Communities: An Historic, Mutual Agenda for Change
For charities, even large, well-established ones, working with multinational corporations can often seem to be a process fraught with pitfalls. The corporate world has for decades been seen as entirely separate—and sometimes even antagonistic—to that of civil society organizations and humanitarian assistance. To NGOs, even simple transactional relationships—the giving and receiving of money—can carry risks, […]
Can Global Partners Collaborate with Local Entrepreneurs and Find Solutions to Urgent Urban Water Challenges in Bangalore?
Water may often be recognized as one of the call out issues linked to the sustainable development agenda globally, but its impacts are always felt locally. The recent water shortage crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, drew international attention and underlined the need for a radical rethink of how to manage urban water. And a […]
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 […]
Re-Imagining the Gender Balance for Female Cotton Farmers
Recently, I put myself in the shoes of a woman cotton farmer in Ivory Coast. I realised very quickly that there aren’t very many of these shoes to fill; the reason being that very few women and men recognise women as cash crop farmers. Cotton farming is one of the main sources of income for […]
How Can We Produce Enough Protein to Feed 10 Billion People?
Accessible, affordable, healthy and sustainable protein is critical to human nutrition and economic development. Yet academic analysis shows it will be impossible for a global population of 10 billion – a figure expected around 2050 – to consume the amount and type of protein typical of current diets in North America and Europe if we want to […]
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 […]
Partnerships – All Talk and No Action?
Partnerships can be costly and complex, and often they don’t deliver their intended goals, but this is not because there is anything inherently wrong with the approach. The usual problem with partnerships is that they are too rarely used effectively. And, they are often over-hyped: they are seen by some as a panacea for the […]
Making a Difference on World Toilet Day 2018: Solving the Sanitation Challenge Through Partnerships
Tokyo, Japan based LIXIL, maker of pioneering water and housing products, believes that creating solutions for the 2.3 billion people that still don’t have access to basic sanitation is an opportunity to solve one of the world’s greatest social challenges, and to do so sustainably by helping to develop a future market Having to defecate […]
Toilets and Trigger Points: How Can We Unlock the Financial Viability of Sanitation Businesses?
As the global push towards the SDGs continues to gather pace, some areas continue to lag behind. Sanitation is one of the most striking examples. Over half the world’s population continue to lack access to a safely managed sanitation service. That is a staggering figure, which demands reflection. Why is sanitation still so far off […]
Toilets, Not Poverty Traps
Cambodia has made remarkable progress in developing its sanitation. The proportion of households having access to toilets leaped from 23% to 68% in the last 10 years. Since 2011, iDE has been involved, training hundreds of entrepreneurs to manufacture and deliver attractive low-cost toilets for their community. Combined with our sanitation marketing demand-creation efforts, these […]
Businesses and Sustainability Standards Empowering Women in Supply Chains
Achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls is the focus of UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, but it is also integral to achieving all of the SDGs. Without doubt, companies and sustainability standards have an important role to play in achieving the goals and driving systemic improvement for women working in factories and […]
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 […]
The Global Sanitation Crisis Presents Lucrative Business Opportunities
This week sees Stockholm play host to World Water Week, an annual event bringing together leaders in the field to discuss how to address the world’s greatest water related challenges. At the top of the agenda is Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: ensuring universal access to water and sanitation. Poor access still affects over half […]
Animal Medicine on the Move: Delivering Agro-Vet Services to Pastoralists
Dr. Jackson Kinyua serves as the Director of Veterinary Services in Garissa County, a rural, semi-arid region of northern Kenya, near the border with Somalia. The public servant’s job is to look after the health of approximately 4.4 million cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and donkeys, which make up the backbone of the county’s economy. It’s […]
From the Ground Up: How Soil-testing Can Help Predict Return-on-investment for African Farmers
One of the principal challenges for Africa’s agricultural sector, and the smallholder farmers who make up the vast majority of its workforce, is low yields. According to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, average maize yields in Kenya are about half those of India; one-third those of Mexico; and less than one-sixth […]
How are Sustainability Standards Innovating to Address the Needs of Certified Small Producers?
Sustainability standards need to ensure that small producers are continuing to benefit from certification. To do that, standards systems need to understand the concerns and priorities of certified small producers and test out innovative approaches to meet those needs. Our new report ‘Understanding Certified Small Producers’ Needs’ is based on interviews with 63 producers in […]
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”. […]
From Produce to Profits: How Mobile Technology Is Strengthening the Livelihoods of Spinach Growers
James Kamau is the chairman of the Tana Farmers Group, an organization of smallholders in central Kenya. He knows his members face a litany of challenges, common to many smallholders across East Africa. Their farms are small and yields are low, and the intermediaries who purchase their crops pay little. The farmers struggle to access […]
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 […]