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Virtue?s Reward? Companies Make The Business Case for Ethical Initiatives
By Michael Skapinker In Unilever ’s London headquarters, Gavin Neath, the consumer goods group’s head of sustainability, takes a plastic contraption out of its cardboard box and places it on a table. It looks like a small and semi-transparent version of the vending machines that dispense drinks to office workers. The device is called a Pureit - and it is a d...
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University of Michigan Students Win Top Honors at Wal-Mart’s Better Living Business Plan Challenge
Students representing the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment won Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.’s first Better Living Business Plan Challenge. Wal-Mart developed the competition to provide business students from around the world an opportunity to invent sustainable products or business solutions. On Friday, April 18, student teams from eight colleges and universities presented their business plans to a panel of executives from Wal-...
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Even the Poorest Can Be a Thriving Market
By Jean-Louis Warnholz The idea that global companies can do good and do well at the ?bottom of the pyramid??that is, among the poor populations of developing countries?has generated excitement among corporations, governments, and NGOs in recent years. But most of the resulting initiatives by multinationals have missed the very poor, the 2 billion people in places like Haiti and Bangladesh who live on less than two dollars a day and have been virtually ignored by the ...
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Small Farmers, Bigger Markets
By Jay Walljasper Poverty is often regarded as a matter of political policy and economic aid. But for ?Thomas George, who grew up on a farm in India where his family struggled to make ends meet, it’s a simple question of agriculture. The vast majority of the world’s poor live on the land, so how do we make farming more profitable for them? A farmer can produce a lot of wonderful tomatoes but that’s no good if there isn’t a demand for t...
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Omidyar Network and Unitus to Help Millions of the Working Poor Participate in the Global Economy
Omidyar Network and Unitus are pleased to announce plans to dramatically expand the worldwide availability of financial services to the poor. Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm established by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, will invest $9 million in Unitus. This will represent Omidyar Network’s largest grant in microfinance to date. Unitus, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating access to microfinance, will use this support to increase its network of microfin...
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Una Laptop por Ni?o
The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ?Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou ?Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC&...
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Paul Polak, Tackling Global Poverty His Own Way
Interview?from Fresh Air from WHYY on April 23, 2008 Paul Polak, founder of the nonprofit International Development Enterprises, has spent 25 years working to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and other countries in the developing world. His perhaps-surprising conclusion: Government subsidies for the rural poor often make things worse. Instead, Polak teaches families and farmers - many of whom live on a dollar a d...
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Creator of Low-cost Pumps for African Farmers Wins MIT Prize
A San Francisco man who is credited with changing the lives of thousands of farmers in Africa with his irrigation pumps has won the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. Martin Fisher is co-founder and chief executive of the San Francisco-based non-profit KickStart, which has developed and marketed low-cost, human-powered pumps that allow farmers to boost the productivity of their land -- and increase their earnings. Rather than simply giving the pumps away, Ki...
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