Speaker: Sebastian Fries, Director Global Access/Emerging Markets, Pfizer, Inc.
Pfizer Inc.’s Emerging Markets Business Unit works across more than 70 countries in Emerging Markets on a strategic platform that emphasizes incremental organic growth, while pursuing strategic acquisitions and partnerships, and seeking game–changing opportunities–enabled by operational excellence, ethics and integrity, communication, and building talent and culture. Pfizer’s Emerging Markets business unit has launched innovative ways of doing business adapted to the unique needs of markets in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and emerging markets in Asia and Europe.
Speaker: Simon Winter, Senior Vice President-Development, TechnoServe.
TechnoServe is an internationally recognized leader in the field of economic development, employing over 400 people. The company helps entrepreneurial men and women in poor areas of the developing world build businesses that create income, opportunity and economic growth for their families, their communities and their countries. Its work has transformed the lives of millions of people in more than 30 countries. Over the course of four decades, TechnoServe has learned what does and doesn’t work. Its scaled-up initiatives and expansion into new industries and regions builds upon and adapts their successful business models and programs.
Speaker: Beth Keck, Senior Director, Women’s Economic Empowerment, Walmart Stores, Inc.
With more than $470 billion in revenue, Walmart has an opportunity to use its scale for social good. Beth Keck, Senior Director for Women’s Economic Empowerment, discussed key turning points in Walmart’s corporate social responsibility journey during the past decade; how the company has developed sustainability and women’s economic empowerment strategies and commitments commiserate with its size, and the role of partnerships with government, NGOs, academics and others in achieving results. Beth leads strategy and oversees implementation of Walmart’s commitment to train one million women in retail and factories, on farms, and in the US workforce. Through its global Women’s Economic Empowerment initiative, Walmart has set goals and invested more than $75 million in philanthropic giving to help change the lives of women around the world.
Speaker: Thierry van Bastelaer, Principal Associate/Scientist – Abt Associates.
Thierry van Bastelaer is Principal Associate at Abt Associates, where he helps design and developthe company’s portfolio of private health finance activities. In addition to his work on healthinsurance and savings in Africa, Thierry is the founder and co-director of Abt’s Risk and Resilience Methods Center, and was named one of Abt’s Senior Fellows. Households living at the Base of the Pyramid demonstrate remarkable skills in dealing with the variety of risks that threaten their health and livelihoods on a daily basis. Too often, however, they are doing so without the benefit of financial tools that, if they were widely available, affordable and flexible, would dramatically decrease these families’ vulnerability and increase their long-term resilience. In particular, insurance products are struggling to keep pace with the increasing costs of health care and the effects of climate change on agriculture. van Bastelaer’s speech examined how a portfolio of inclusive financial products and services—such as commitment savings and microinsurance—are giving low-income families across the developing world more tools to ensure that shocks do not push them further into poverty. Using examples such as health savings, micro health insurance, and index-based weather insurance, he suggests how the combination of technology and financial services has the potential to give low-income families a stronger handle on their economic and personal well being.
Speaker: Henning Alts Shoutz, Marketing Manager, CEMEX-Patrimonio Hoy.
Patrimonio Hoy is one of the first private initiatives that combine what most companies aspire to: it is a real inclusive business being profitable and at the same time producing important social and economic impacts to the participating families and communities.
Inadequate sanitation negatively affects the lives of billions of people in the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in the developing world, and has a particularly substantial impact on the well-being of millions of young children. Given the magnitude of the challenge and the limitations of existing approaches, enterprise-led approaches to providing public goods are generating growing interest. Emphasizing convergent innovation, enterprises targeting the BoP are presented as potentially sustainable and scalable interventions that generate positive poverty-alleviation effects. Yet our understanding of who is affected, and how, remains limited. To begin to address this gap, we apply a multidimensional framework to an urban-based, sanitation-oriented BoP enterprise, focusing on its poverty-alleviation effects on young children. Our analysis indicates that the enterprise’s effects include changes in capability, economic, and relationship well-being and that these changes can be positive or negative. We also find that the impact varies depending on the role of the stakeholder in the business model and the age of the child. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how to assess the effectiveness of a sanitation intervention and how to evaluate the poverty-alleviation implications of an enterprise-led approach.
Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) enterprises seek to serve impoverished customers in informal markets. While BoP enterprises have grown in prominence, comparatively little multidimensional theoretical work has explored why these customers ultimately elect to purchase their products. Using a sample of 555 potential customers of VisionSpring in rural India, our results indicate that the influence of different dimensions of poverty on likelihood of purchase is largely a function of the strength of the formal institutional environment. Specifically, stronger formal institutional environments can act as both a complement to, and a substitute for, the influence of individual- and network-level norms on purchasing decisions in informal markets.
This teaching case study examines Honey Care Africa’s transition from obligating farmers to maintain their own hives to providing hive management services. Readers will explore ways to enhance this new model including strategies to reduce side-selling and opportunities to generate greater impacts on farmers’ families, in particular young children.
Case study on the impact of Penda Health on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. Penda Health proves primary care, both curative and preventative, to low- and middle-income families in Kenya while also specializing in women’s health care. The outpatient clinic offers evidence-based, standardized, high- quality primary health care in a friendly environment.
Case study on the impact of Villa Andina on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. Villa Andina operates in Peru and produces high-quality agro-industrial food products through its work with local smallholder farmers. The venture trains framers in organic cultivation techniques and provides guaranteed payment for the crops produced.