Enterprise Excellence 1

Stories of Excellence

Soft soap
Unilever is a leading transnational in hygiene, personal care, food and cleaning products. Hindustan Lever, its subsidiary in India, has found a novel way to increase market penetration while raising incomes and hygiene standards in remote rural communities. Key to its success has been providing the capital and training necessary to enable women in such communities to act as entrepreneurs for their products. As they are able to work from within these communities, they become effective ambassadors for greater standards of health and hygiene at the same time as generating sustainable income streams. The company now works with 15,000 underprivileged women to bring its products to 70 million rural consumers. In doing so it is helping to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially those in the area of poverty eradication, education, gender equality and the empowerment of women (see below for a list of these Goals). Website: www.hll.com

Spurring markets
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, has teamed up with a group of business leaders to launch a campaign to that aims to provide a framework for businesses who want to help in the fight against poverty but are not quite sure how to go about it. This problem often occurs because they need to be able to judge between a plethora of wealth generating projects all vying for their time, expertise and money. While in the short term this campaign, called the Millennium Promise, is using corporate philanthropy, especially in areas of extreme poverty, the long-term strategy is to encourage private investment to spur markets and accelerate economic growth, thus removing the need for charitable donations. For the full story, see www.millenniumpromise.org

Reducing poverty through growth
The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) is a scheme to stimulate economic uplift by providing development assistance to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. Initiated by the US government, with strong bipartisan support, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) was established to administer the MCA, Congress providing nearly $2.5 billion in initial funding. The MCA draws on lessons learned about development over the past 50 years:

• Aid works most effectively when it reinforces sound political, economic and social policies. Such policies encourage investment and commerce, which fuel growth;
• If low-income countries are given primary responsibility for implementing development plans, the sense of ownership helps ensure the plans succeed;
• Monitoring and evaluation needs to be built in to development activity to bolster effectiveness, accountability and transparency.

For more information, see www.mca.gov

New heroes
Film star Robert Redford recently presented a TV series called the New Heroes, which tells the stories of fourteen aspiring individuals from various countries and cultural backgrounds who use entrepreneurial skills to alleviate poverty, disease and unemployment. Referred to in the series as 'social entrepreneurs' their work brings life-changing tools and resources within reach of people in poverty who are eager to find commercially viable routes out of poverty. A helpful interactive website has been set up in the wake of the series – www.pbs.org

Centre for enterprise
The global energy group BP has established an Enterprise Centre in Azerbaijan. The Centre's aim is to help local companies develop their business in support of major oil and gas operations in Azerbaijan. It provides free training in management, IT, finance, quality control, marketing, health and safety and environmental standards.

The results are positive both for BP and for local Azerbaijani firms. The benefits to local industry help to strengthen the local infrastructure and more competitive local firms offer BP a greater choice of cost-effective suppliers. Building local SME capacity encourages improvements in business practices, staff development, investments in technology, safety performance, transparency, governance and institutional development. As Azerbaijan is a transitional economy in which corruption remains widespread, such improvements are particularly welcome. The Centre's website is www.ecbaku.com

Mobile markets
In your pocket is a powerful means to liberate people from poverty. And it's not your wallet. It's your mobile phone! Whereas in rich countries mobile phones often provide little more than additional convenience, in poor countries they are fast becoming one of the most significant lifelines out of the poverty trap. A recent study by the London Business School for Vodafone reveals that rises in mobile phone use in a developing country has a strikingly positive impact, not only on social capital, but also on that country's growth in GDP. One of the reasons for this is that mobiles are simple to use, requiring neither internet access nor the ability to read or write. The impact on GDP is set to increase as technology companies seek to make phones more affordable for poor people. Motorola is delivering 6 million handsets for less than $40 to developing countries and new chips developed by Philips will mean that handset prices are set to drop to below $20. The Vodafone study can be seen here: www.vodafone.com The current edition of the Developments magazine (issue 31) carries several articles on the socio-economic impact of mobile phone technology. These are due to appear in electronic form at www.developments.org.uk