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Linking Business with Pro-Poor Development

Linking Business with Pro-Poor Development explores two key questions, How can business be pro-poor? and How can such partnerships be made sustainable? The document showcases how an innovative private-community partnership transformed the livelihoods of highly vulnerable families in far flung...

Trade Finance: Make it work for women

Trade Finance: Make it work for women, a news article, reports that women make up 70% of the world's poor, and it is important that they be given access to finance, which is critical to business success. The global financial crisis exacerbates an already dissatisfactory situation of trade financing...

New guidelines to help investors measure success of microfinance institutions

According to this news article, socially responsible investors are choosing to invest in microfinance to help alleviate poverty. By means of often very small loans, financial services, and technology, microfinance helps the poor, often women, to start self-sustaining businesses in order to escape...

Free Management Library

The Free Management Library (FML) provides an easy-to-access and comprehensive database of basic and practical managerial and business information for leaders and managers running large and small non-profit and for-profit organisations with very limited resources. The FML currently lists...

Inclusive Business: Profitable business for successful development

Inclusive Business: Profitable business for successful development, a paper published by The Alliance for Inclusive Business and the WBCSD, defines Inclusive Business as one that seeks to contribute to poverty alleviation by including lower-income communities within its value chain while not losing...

Business UNusual

Business UNusual, a collaborative publication of the United Nations Global Compact Office and the Global Public Policy Institute, provides an overview of recent partnership activities in the United Nations, as well as the challenges the UN faces in its efforts to engage the private sector and...

WBCSD Annual Review 2010/2011

WBCSD’s 2010/2011 Annual Review looks back at the activities carried out in the past year and reflects on the challenges ahead. The review uses Vision 2050 as the red thread to show how the WBCSD’s work programme aligns with the pathway it describes, and the role of business in moving toward a...

Doing Business with the World: The New Role of Corporate Leadership in Global Development

Doing Business with the World, a publication of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), describes how companies can contribute to global sustainable development through their core businesses in a way that is profitable for the companies and good for development.

BBC micro enterprise article: "Tales of Africa's entrepreneurs"

BBC News Online says that while the world's leaders are "thrashing out strategies to improve the plight of the poor in Africa", many aid agencies are stressing that genuine progress must come from "small-scale projects as well as large international initiatives". The article then tells the tale of...

Harvard Business Page: Micro enterprise article

In this HBS Working Knowledge interview, Senior Research Fellow Jed Emerson, co-author of a new book on nonprofits, discusses the challenges of the community-based enterprise.

BBC article: So Afr-Eco Community Upliftment Project (SAECUP)

SAECUP is a non-profit organisation established a decade ago in South Africa to provide refuge for poor women and children. This BBC article explains the history behind SAECUP, and includes an interview with the founder. Over 130 woman are involved in a micro enterprise project, which transforms...

Promoting Small and Medium Enterprises for Sustainable Development

Promoting Small and Medium Enterprises for Sustainable Development, a paper published by the WCSD, discusses the way in which governments can help alleviate poverty by focusing on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and how larger corporations can help themselves by including SMEs in their value...

Standards of Corporate Social Responsibility

Standards of Corporate Social Responsibility, established by the Social Venture Network, are defined in terms of nine interrelated topics. There are three general topics: ethics, accountability, and governance; and, six topics related to each stakeholder group: investors, employees, business...

Principles for Responsible Investment

The Principles for Responsible Investment provide the framework for investment professionals to incorporate environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues into the management of investment portfolios. Investors fulfilling their fiduciary (or equivalent) duty therefore need to give...

Code of Ethics of the South African NGO Coalition

Code of Ethics of the South African NGO Coalition is written to focus NGOs in redressing inequality and improving the lives of all people in South Africa. This code has six sections covering values, governance, accountability, management and human resources, finance and resources.

People at the heart of sustainable business - the IBLF Annual Review 2008-9

The IBLF annual review examines the way in which the Forum has been contributing to the development of sustainable business, arguing that the members of the Forum are leaders in this field, and that IBLF has a particular understanding of the way in which business solutions can contribute to...

Business and the millennium development goals: a framework for action

This report provides a framework for action on how companies and business coalitions can work with the UN system, governments, and civil society organisations to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aimed at making globalisation a more positive force for more of the world's people.

Micro Enterprise success in Bangladesh

The Bangladesh Krishi Bank was established in 1973 with the objective of strengthening the rural economy by extending credit support to the agricultural and agro-based sectors. In consideration of the importance of Micro-Credit and with the objective of generating employment as well as encouraging...

Stimulating Youth Entrepreneurship - Barriers and incentives to enterprise start-ups by young people

The world’s population is growing at a time when traditional, stable labour markets are shrinking. More than 1 billion people today are between 15 and 24 years of age and nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population is below the age of 20. The ILO estimates that 47 per cent of all unemployed...

Social enterprises 'growing strongly'

The UK's social enterprises - businesses trading for social or environmental purposes - bucked the recent recession, a report has said.