Tag: Case Studies

What Happens When Competitors Collaborate?

In Malawi Christian Aid has found that a common purpose – realising the potential of the rice and pigeon pea sectors – has brought competitors together with interesting results. You may wonder why competing smallholder co-operatives, buyers, traders, processors and exporters would join forces? Well, ultimately they believed it’s better to be competitors in a […]

Hybrid Social Finance: Partnerships That Drive Success

By Bernard Coffey, Former business leader and long-time volunteer, Ashoka Support Network (ASN) team It was a simple networking dinner where a business executive met a social entrepreneur with a great idea, which led to a long-term and very successful partnership in the nascent field of social finance and “impact investing.” The social entrepreneur, Luke […]

Narrowing the Divide between the Rich and Poor

Upon arrival into Panama City, one is struck by the new skyscrapers, architectural wonders and causeways in celebration of the prosperous trade traffic navigating the Canal, reporting fiscal revenues of $2.61 billion in 2015. Panama is booming, with an average economic growth of 9 percent in the past five years, the highest in Latin America. […]

The Ripple Effect of Vision Care on the SDGs

When the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) were formally adopted last year, many in the sustainability community saw this as a moment of triumph. The seventeen goals are not only ambitious but also universal, and the private sector worked hand in hand with government and academics in their development. Yet sceptics have wondered whether the […]

Sustainable Living: Engaging with Social Entrepreneurs

By Jeremy Basset, Head of Unilever Foundry Through the Unilever Foundry, social impact businesses can engage with Unilever to access mentorship, explore partnership opportunities and receive funding. In the same way that we help entrepreneurs in the digital marketing space go from start-up to scale-up, we’re now looking to bring those capabilities to the forefront […]

Partnership for Indonesia Sustainable Agriculture

In late October I joined a site visit to a sustainable coffee project, which is part of the Partnership for Indonesia Sustainable Agriculture (PISAgro) partnership. It is no exaggeration to say that I was blown away by the project: impressed; inspired; and, most of all, convinced by the multi-stakeholder approach. The coffee project is led […]

Goodbye Cotton, Hello Hemp?

Cotton. You love it, I love it, but Mother Nature freakin’ hates it. About 20 million tons of cotton are produced each and every year, making it far and away the world’s most profitable non-food crop. But it’s resource intensive in a big way. It takes about 20,000 liters of water to produce just one […]

Fighting Malaria, Improving Health. Together

“We know what works. The challenge now is to do even more.” That was the mission set out by Dr Margaret Chan, World Health Organization director-general, as she introduced the latest annual malaria report. Published just last month, this showed astonishing progress against one of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases. Since the start of […]

More than Just Microfinance

This is Arlene Montejo, a small-scale farmer from the beautiful yet isolated mountain village of Sudlon II on the outskirts of Cebu City in the Philippines. Arlene, like millions of poor people around the world, relies solely on farming to generate an income and support her family. She grows a variety of vegetables including lettuces, […]

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Poverty here in Vietnam is hidden away. Tourists flock to the urban centres, to the fancy sights of Ha Long Bay, or up to the remote north to buy handbags sewn together by hill-tribe communities. The injustice of poverty here is not obvious on the surface and, as a visitor, you’d be forgiven for not […]

Tackling Gender Inequality in Pakistan

Following a trip to Pakistan, Dr Ajaz Ahmed Khan tells us about a very interesting project implemented by our MFI partner AKHUWAT. Transgender people, or khwaja siras as they are often referred to in Pakistan, routinely face a high level of discrimination in access to health, housing, education and employment as well as ridicule, intimidation […]

The Perception of Corporate Volunteering

By Natasha Bridge, Management Consultant, Accenture and VSO Volunteer Results from a recent national online poll, commissioned by leading international development charity VSO, show that 56% of British full time workers would freely volunteer their skills to fight poverty in a developing country, if they had the support of their employer. The ‘Perception of Corporate […]

In Praise of Low Bono

I work for EY, running Enterprise Growth Services (EGS) – a programme which sends our consultants, both local and international, to help promising social impact enterprises grow. We help solar companies understand their customers better, WASH businesses build scalable franchises, and ag enterprises improve their cashflow. Our projects are full time, hands-on, mostly in sub-Saharan […]

Creating Businesses from Nothing

“Entrepreneurship is key to tackling youth unemployment”, said H.E. Joyce Kikafuna, Ugandan High Commissioner to the UK, at an event held by Grow Movement on Tuesday 17 November. The event was held to mark Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world’s largest celebration of entrepreneurs which takes place in 160 countries around the world. From networking events […]

Celebrating the Power of Mentoring

Onty Mogofu says she was “born with an entrepreneurial spirit.” As a young girl in Botswana, she started plaiting the hair of the women in her village for a small fee, taking her profits home to supplement the family income. Onty now runs a thriving events management company called 360 Events Affair, which provides training, […]