Overstating the possibilities for business to fight poverty?

[David Satterthwaite]

I have difficulties seeing how conventional businesses will 'fight' many aspects of poverty and worry that donors are moving away from other important aspects of poverty reduction because they find them difficult. More competent, effective and accountable local governments are critical for many aspects of poverty reduction - but donors are not very good at knowing how to support these or support national governments to support these. Representative organizations of the urban and rural poor are also very important for poverty reduction, for what they do, what they demand and what they can offer government agencies and other civil society groups as partners, yet most official donors find it difficult to support them (or even listen to them). Obviously, prosperity (to which private businesses contribute much) is an important underpinning of poverty reduction but look at the number of booming cities where poverty and exclusion are actually increasing.

[Phil]

David - I have posted a blog on effective public private partnerships today. You may also want to look at my ideas on the subject as per the attached paper

[Lucy Nickoll]

I can't say whether donors are moving away from important aspects of poverty reduction and instead focusing on private businesses (which I doubt is the easy option either) but nevertheless I am pleased to see an attempt at including business, and private businesses appearing on their radar. In this respect I hope what we are seeing is a more joined up response to tackling poverty by including all the actors in the system. I am here on this website because I think business needs to be a part of the solution, along with all the other actors like local govts, CBOs etc as mentioned above.

[Nathan Ketsdever]

Grameen Bank, Kickstart International, and International Development Enterprises all provide fantastic empirical examples. Also, many of the winners of the Social Capitalist awards from Fast Company are examples as well.

[Ida Horner]

In a nutshell, any initiatives that support the ending of such dependency as to kill off local enterprise, creativity, skills and markets should be supported in whichever way to ensure that they thrive.

Business on it's own cannot resolve some of the complex issues as to why people are poor but joint working and sharing of information on what works best is a way forward