Business Call to Action: transforming lives through business

Today, the UK Government and the United Nations Development Programme will be hosting an event of over 80 CEO’s in London. The Business Call to Action event will bring together business leaders from around the world and challenge their companies to explore new business opportunities that use their core business expertise in a way that contributes both to the Millennium Development Goals and to their commercial success.

Last July, in a speech at the UN, the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a new global partnership to deal with what is a development emergency: the shortfall in progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The PM and the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, have both made clear this is a global Call to Action which cannot be achieved by governments alone, and where the private sector has a unique role. The speech was accompanied by two statements, one by Heads of State and the other by business

The Business Call to Action Website, includes more on the event and the MDG Call to Action, speeches, a live blog from the event, video, films and photos.

I believe the event is significant for two reasons. First, it showcases the important contribution that businesses can make through their core business. The event will look at new business ideas and initiatives which go beyond philanthropy, and that will support economic growth and reduce poverty in developing countries.

Numerous other examples of this sort of good practice are highlighted by Business Action for Africa and showcased on our Google Map. The second reason that the event is important is that it implicitly recognises that growth, enterprise and employment are the only long-term solutions to poverty.

If you are interested in fighting poverty through business, I would urge you to join Business Fights Poverty – a professional network of experts and practitioners from around the world that we have just set up. The Business Call to Action event is the start of a long journey - it will take a movement of like-minded people, not just an event, to make the difference that is needed.

The Mystery of Tradition: why Tradition and Capital May Work Well in Africa and Not in the West

Two similar, and parallel, private agricultural initiatives in Ghana illustrate the potential for working with existing traditional hierarchies and community structures in Africa that big multinational companies often ignore / do not understand.

A local entrepreneur of rural origin and with limited previous business experience (second hand cloth imports), has used collaboration with the traditional leaders and bigger farmers as a solution to common problems, such as: technological innovation being undermined by superstitions, lack of cash and access to agricultural inputs among rural dwellers, insecurity of loan repayments and cash transfers, speculative competition. The company has rapidly increased its turnover, profit and is now borrowing commercially to expand its production into new regions.

At the same time, a similarly structured agricultural scheme led by highly trained financial experts and a multinational food company failed to ensure small holders’ productivity increases and loyalty. The company moved to commercial block farming where, while still struggling to make good commercial returns, the impact on the community and poverty is much lower and more limited.

I highlight these and other examples from Malawi and elsewhere in a recent essay. My argument, informed also by my work at Emerging Markets Group, is that big multinational companies and many donors / foundations, have been too focused on working through formal systems that may not work well in Africa. There has been a consistent attempt to try to make African ‘capitalism’ more like in the West rather than adapt to the potential of the indigenous traditional systems. This has led to lowered ability to solve inherent problems and has led to a resistance to invest in commercially fertile grounds.

Talking business in Ghana

I co-chaired the EU-Africa Business Forum in Ghana recently (21-22 June), an honour I was less than sure about after the largely declaratory inaugural meeting in Brussels last November. But we tasked the four working-groups (trade, entrepreneurship, infrastructure and ICT) to come up with deadlined deliverables and the results (fed into the AU Summit) were not bad.

Given the political profile - lots of AU and EU people there, led by their respective Commissioners Maxwell Mkwezalamba and Louis Michel - the Forum has the potential to be quite a good way of getting across business concerns (I was for example able to make various interventions in support of more efficient intra-regional trade flows)... though, having now done three big meetings across Africa in three weeks, I am also mindful of the danger of over-stretch/overlap/dilution.