The Business Innovation Facility (BIF) offers two types of support:

1. “Long Projects” - Long term technical support (in general between three and six months).
2. “Short Projects” - Short term technical support (in general up to 20 days) provided to an individual business or a cluster of organisations, e.g. via workshops

The impact…

Do we in the Business Innovation Facility consider Inclusive Business (IB) to be different from corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Yes, as we define IB as “profitable core business activity that also tangibly expands opportunities for the people at the base of the economic pyramid (BoP): as producers, suppliers,…

How to scale up a successful local sourcing strategy into an independent sustainable business model?...

Build it in phases and don’t do it on your own.

These would be my top two recommendations, based on my recent involvement with one of our…

It was a ginger-grinding shift not a chilli pepper shift during my second visit to the AACE Foods factory in Lagos earlier this month – yet this didn’t make a difference to my constant sneezing and coughing. Other than that an awful lot has changed since my first visit in March 2011 and coming back to meet the company again in July 2012.…

“The poor don’t want shampoo they want jobs.”

Arguably this statement might be worth discussing in many contexts, however as an argument against business approaches that target the base of the pyramid (BoP) it doesn’t really do the trick for me.

Taking the show of hands at the end of yesterday’s debate -advertised as a fight between “responsible capitalism” and “business as usual”- as an indicator, I wasn’t alone with my…

It has to be said that when Karen Smith, BIF Malawi country manager, and I visited the 126Ha site that Malawi Mangoes (MM) have secured for their banana plantation in early December last year, there was very little to see! However, it didn’t take much imagination to understand the potential for this big thinking business start up.  …

When will the project reach break-even, how many smallholders will directly benefit, what additional income can they expect and what are the potential impacts on the food production and packaging industry in Malawi and the Southern Africa region? 

These were just some of the issues discussed last week between the BIF team and Universal Industries, when setting the …

With roughly 1.5 years left in the pilot, the BIF team met in Dhaka last week to review progress and agree on implementation strategies for the coming years. After an initial meeting in London last year, many of the country team members based in our five pilot countries, UK based team members, alliance partners and DFID met…

Reporting from a local forum held in Colombia where local business leaders and academics joined to discuss the dynamics of social responsibility and inclusive business in the region, in a recent blog on next billion Martin Herrndorf highlights some interesting lessons and conclusions.

Most interestingly from the Facility perspective,…

Some of the world’s most successful companies are changing the way they do business by adopting new approaches to innovation that tackle poverty in the developing world. Measuring the development and business impacts of these pro-poor, inclusive business initiatives is not always straightforward or easy.

During the Business Call to Action’s (BCtA) first webinar event on Thursday, January 13, Jason Saul, CEO of…

An interesting mix of panellists, bringing perspectives from business, academia and development as well as a diverse audience created a lively discussion at an event hosted by CARE International UK in London about the changing face of development: the role of the private sector on Wednesday.

The discussion, focused on three key questions:

1. Why does development…