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 […]
Planting the Seeds for Development
It has been eight years since Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work planting trees in Kenya. During that period, the Rio+ 20 conference has been and gone, Climate Change has finally come to be recognised as a serious worldwide threat, and terms such as ‘Green Growth’ have started to emerge. In […]
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 […]
Scale Up: How do Social Enterprises Meet the Challenge?
Executives from three leading social enterprises—Jaipur Rugs Company, Sproxil, and WaterHealth International—met in New York City on Monday, September 24 to discuss the challenges of scaling up double-bottom line businesses that generate both commercial returns and sustainable development impacts. The Business Call to Action (BCtA), in collaboration with Columbia Business School’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, […]
Helping Corporates achieve Sustainable Development Goals through new funding models
The innovative Carbon for Water programme unlocked private sector finance to deliver safe water to 4.5 million people a year. For 15 years, ClimateCare has worked with large blue chip organisations who, having taken steps to reduce carbon emissions and want to address their residual footprint, by funding external emission reduction projects. Our name is […]
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 […]
Promoting New Thinking About Collaboration
Millions of Australians will end it comatose, as the annual Melbourne Cup tradition of drinking-your-entire-body-weight-in-beer-before-lunch will ensure that particular country’s collective outputs for 24 hours will be, at best, sub-optimal. As the table-top dancing down under comes to a close, the United States of America will awake to Election Day, with polls still saying the […]
DFID, Business and the Post-2015 Agenda
Last week members of the UN High Level Panel met in London to discuss the successor to the Millennium Development Goal framework. The meetings, co-chaired by PM Cameron, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, represent a unique opportunity to reflect on what new framework could drive poverty eradication when the […]
DFID, Business and the Post-2015 Development Agenda
Last week members of the UN High Level Panel met in London to discuss the successor to the Millennium Development Goal framework. The meetings, co-chaired by PM Cameron, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, represent a unique opportunity to reflect on what new framework could drive poverty eradication when the […]
Post-2015: Why a focus on business responsibility and tax would be a missed opportunity
In contrast to twelve years ago, when the Millennium Development Goals were first agreed, now – as the world starts to think about what will replace them in 2015 – business is very much on the agenda. Business Fights Poverty has co-hosted two events that looked at this (one on Tuesday and one in September), […]
Business, the MDGs and Beyond
The world has made more gains against poverty in the last 50 years than in the last 500. Since 1990, over six hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty. The world is within reach of seeing every child enrolled in primary school, and many fewer lives are being lost to hunger and disease. […]
Creating Shared Value: the role of business in development
Nestlé, in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), is co-hosting the 4th edition of the Creating Shared Value Forum on Monday 5 November in New Delhi, India. This will take place at 9:30 AM – 18:00 PM IST / 04:00 AM – 12:30 PM GMT. The theme of the […]
Fostering the Growth of Inclusive Businesses
Doing business with the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) isn’t exactly “business as usual”. From the start-up to the scale-up phases companies doing business with the poor come with their own set of challenges. How to overcome challenges for scaling-up and replicating commercially viable inclusive business modelswas the focus of the first G20 Inclusive Business […]
The Water Food Energy Nexus
By 2050 demand for resources is set to increase significantly as the global population grows to nine billion and becomes more prosperous. Global economic growth is being driven largely by emerging markets. Over the medium term, the World Bank estimates economic growth of 6% in developing countries compared to 2.7% in higher-income countries1. This is […]