From Suicidal Depression to Social Entrepreneur: Creating a New $bn Industry for Rural Africa
15 years ago I was working in the London advertising industry, promoting products I didn’t believe in for clients who didn’t appreciate it. I ended up asking myself ‘What am I doing with my life?’ The lack of a sense of true purpose and meaning in my life lead me into a downward spiral and, […]
Applying Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Methods in Cocoa Sustainability Program Evaluations
Working out whether or not your sustainability program is having the impact you intend is more complex than you might think. There’s heated debate among academics and practitioners around how to do it best, much of it pointing out that designing a perfect measurement methodology in theory is a lot more straightforward than applying it […]
How Can the Healthcare Sector Leverage its Economic Power to Address Climate Change?
Towards a roadmap for Climate-smart Healthcare in Europe Healthcare contributes with ~5% to global greenhouse gas emissions through energy consumption, transport, and product manufacture, use and disposal. The lion’s share of emissions come from the healthcare supply chain – the production, transport, and disposal of goods and services, such as pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, food […]
Six Lessons: Learning from Impact Evaluation in Cocoa Farming
Understanding the impact of development interventions is a complex process. From picking the most suitable measurement and evaluation (M&E) methodology, to designing a suitable plan for implementing it in the field, there might appear to be endless hurdles to the uninitiated. Mondelēz International’s cocoa sustainability program Cocoa Life works with Ipsos as an M&E partner. […]
We Finally Have an Official Climate Emergency. But is that the full picture?
We are just midway through the year and yet 2019 has already seen several unprecedented weather events from Cyclone Fani, which evacuated more than a million people in India, to the two storms that devastated the Mozambican coast. These disasters have thrown into sharp focus just how much climate change is compounding our already complex […]
How Can Consumer Goods Companies Harness Technology to Most Effectively Tackle Modern Slavery in their Global Supply Chains?
According to the Global Slavery Index, 40.3 million people are in some form of modern slavery, including 24.9 million in forced labour. The ILO reports that US$150 billion of illegal profits are generated by forced labour each year. The issue has rapidly gained public and political attention in recent years. Legislation has strengthened companies’ formal […]
How Harnessing Technology is Modernising Informal Retail in Emerging Markets to Deliver Social Impact
More than 61% of the world’s employed population – two billion people – earn their livelihoods in the informal sector, with 93% of the world’s informal employment occurring in emerging and developing countries. 86% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa is informal and 80% of household retail is delivered via informal retailers. Yet informal retailers face […]
Business Fights Poverty Oxford 2019 Connection Zone Lunch: Transcending Conflict to Fight Poverty
“Seventy-three percent of people in the societies of the bottom billion have recently been through a civil war or are still in one,” said Professor Collier in The Bottom Billion. Conflict is “pretty distinctive,” he says, to the poorest countries on the planet. In these countries conflict tends to be a pattern, often prolonged. In […]
PREVIEW #BFPOXFORD Keynote Profile: Monique Ntumngia, Winner of the Visa Everywhere Initiative
“But Madam, we do not have lights; how are we going to be able to study at night? “When we go into the bushes to search for firewood for cooking, we usually get raped. Madam, we need this to stop.” Aminata, the leader of a group of Muslim girls, presented these questions to my team […]
The Journey of Total to Inclusive Energy Solutions
Over the last decade, many multinational corporations (MNCs) have attempted to set up inclusive businesses of one kind or another, with varying success. Despite good intentions and the investment of significant resources, few of these pilots have been successful and an even smaller proportion has reached significant scale. Conversations with the intrapreneurs who have been […]
Embracing Corporate Responsibility — For Social and Business Impact
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is necessary vocabulary in today’s corporate lexicon. But what CSR really means within the walls of everyday corporate life remains subjective. As we shift toward more conscientious lifestyles, businesses are searching for a true understanding of the customer, partner, supply chain, and employee interpretation of purpose. Companies are exploring how purpose […]
Doing Nothing is Not an Option
Kristin Komives, ISEAL’s Impacts Director spoke to Arjen, the opening key note at this year’s Global Sustainability Standards symposium, to hear his opinion on what’s needed to have a real positive impact. Companies, and the sustainability standards and NGOs that work with them, need to always be thinking about how they can make a positive […]
Pakistani Businesses Need to Hire and Retain More Women to Flourish
Pakistan has made progress in boosting women’s education levels over the past several years—yet less than 8 percent of the country’s workforce are women. Closing that gap will represent a huge economic opportunity for our country. I’m excited that the private sector is taking steps to address the problem. At the Pakistan Stock Exchange on […]
The Business Case for Climate-Resilient Agriculture
In 2018, the World Economic Forum ranked extreme weather events and natural disasters as the top two global risks for businesses in terms of likelihood. Modern supply chains rely on complex and increasingly interconnected global networks, leaving both companies and producers around the world vulnerable to climate threats. But climate change is a local issue just as […]
We Won’t Take This Lying Down: Women, Business and Equality in 2019
Based on the current rate of progress, it will take 202 years to close the economic gender gap globally, according to research from World Economic Forum. And so, it was with trepidation that I stepped into the University Women’s Club, London, to learn more about how the Foundation intends to close the gap, faster. If […]
Spurring Communities, Confidence and Communication: How Companies are Tackling Gender-Based Violence
Across the world the costs of GBV are staggering. A 2017 study on garment workers in Cambodia reported that nearly one in three female garment workers had been sexually harassed in the preceding 12 months. The resulting turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism at work cost the Cambodian garment industry the equivalent of 0.52 percent of Cambodia’s […]
The Best Kept Secret: The Role of Corporate Foundations in Building Sustainable Brands
For too long, companies have overlooked and undervalued the role of corporate foundations as partner for sustainability. Corporate foundations have been perceived as a nice social appendix to a company’s CSR report, or as a means to fulfilling the moral responsibility and stakeholder pressure of being a good corporate citizen. Lately, however, front-running companies are […]
Becoming a Bit More Social
One of the most recent exposés on life along the supply chain came from The Daily Mail. The article revealed that some factory workers in India suffer from horrendous burns when shelling cashew nuts. The burns come from caustic acids that naturally exist between the cashew nut and its outer shell. As is often the […]
Building Back Better in the Caribbean: The Clinton Foundation and Partnerships for Change
How do we empower communities – especially those furthest behind – to have a chance to succeed, improve their lives, and build a better future? There are several answers to the question – create economic opportunity, improve public health, and inspire civic engagement and service. These are the core elements that drive the work we […]
Why Large and Small Businesses Need to Collaborate to Compete in Complex Markets
The expression ‘no man is an island’ could be re-phrased ‘no business is an island’ with just as much validity, as it is self-evident that individual businesses, wherever they are located, are just one small part of a complex ecosystem, which normally extends far beyond the immediate locality of their geographical base. But as in […]