FSG is celebrating women in leadership this International Women's Day, March 8. Regardless of where you are in the world, we are happy to share these gender equity resources with you.
Implementers of market-based sanitation (MBS) interventions have a vested interest in creating a competitive supply of toilets in India. To do so requires them to improve the viability of sanitation enterprises in the market. Implementers, however, often lack an understanding of enterprise viability.
Gender-lens (or gender-smart) investing refers to investments that achieve greater social and financial returns on investment by focusing on businesses that are owned or led by women, have good gender balance, and/or serve women customers with their products and services.
A Practitioner’s Guide to Supporting Market Systems Change toward Inclusion and Equity
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and highlighted the inequities that perpetuate harmful outcomes for billions of people around the globe. A growing number of voices call for global leaders to seize this crisis as an opportunity to “rebuild better.” However, this is easier said than done.
How can leaders help markets achieve systemic transformations toward inclusion and equity?
A case study on Energía para la Paz, a shared value initiative of Grupo Energía Bogotá
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After Colombia's historic 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla group, people in rural areas heavily affected by the conflict began dreaming about a different future. However, decades of violence had left hundreds of landmines, thousands of deaths, and millions of people displaced, in addition to high levels of poverty and a weakened social fabric.
Faced with the COVID-19 crisis, communities in Massachusetts have come together in inspiring ways to assess emerging needs, provide credible information, expand access to services, and provide opportunities for older adults to connect with each other and with their neighbors.
By 2050, over two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. However, water and sanitation services are often unable to keep pace with population growth in rapidly urbanizing cities, leading to deteriorating health conditions.
Household sanitation is a longstanding development priority for the government of Uganda. However, access to basic sanitation is still low and the country is off-track to meet the Sustainability Development Goal related to universal access to sanitation by 2030. This, coupled with the government’s policy that considers sanitation to be a household responsibility, provides tremendous opportunity to foster market-based sanitation as the mechanism to increase basic sanitation across the country.
With increasing recognition that markets today create wealth and positive social impact inequitably, more companies must rethink their purpose and strategies in order to provide real and lasting solutions to these substantial problems. In the process, they must identify new business models to ensure a more positive impact on key environmental and social conditions and set themselves ambitious financial and social targets.
On the surface, India’s impact investing ecosystem is thriving. There is high activity with deals happening across sectors and enterprise stages. At the same time, the narrative on impact investing has primarily been centered on capital supply and many investors in India have focused on achieving market-rate returns. This focus on returns left us wondering: are there areas currently not benefitting from this dynamic market?
