Growing Sustainable Business

What the GSB can offer

Business-led enterprise solutions to poverty are challenging and are often perceived as representing unquantifiable risk and additional costs to business, causing potentially interested investors to place opportunities on the “too complicated” pile. The value proposition of the GSB to business is to help address these challenges at relevant points in the investment cycle and thus reduce the risks and costs associated with the investment.

The GSB delivery mechanism helps reduce risk. It is a platform for companies to engage in pro-poor business activities in developing countries with a challenging business environment. Looking beyond social investments and philanthropy, the GSB mechanism is a service offered to companies that seek to develop commercially viable business projects within their core business or value chain with a view to increasing profitability and/or engaging in new markets. At its core, the GSB provides a vehicle for a company to do well by doing good.

Company benefits

Partnering through the GSB mechanism provides credibility created through a multi-stakeholder approach, which helps remove obstacles to a business investment and facilitates access to supplementary finance, new markets and information. The GSB is set up to broker partnerships, which enable a company to engage with the host Government, civil society, the donor community, and investment partners. Meanwhile, the accumulated expertise of GSB partners represents an opportunity for developing or refining business models that are adapted to the local circumstances and needs, and for identifying opportunities for integrated cross-sector solutions, such as complementary products and risk sharing.

Business Investment for Poverty Reduction

Poverty reduction is a question of accelerating achievement of the MDGs by providing the poor with access to needed goods/services and to livelihoods opportunities. This implies that a business investment can help reduce poverty by establishing infrastructure and/or by otherwise providing needed goods and services, as well as by generating local economic development and employment.

Investment Cycle and Value Proposition

The GSB initiative offers companies with comprehensive and driven-based value propositions to resolve potential challenges and risk factors for investment in developing countries. More ...