We send our love and solidarity to everyone in these challenging times.
It's time to take stock. To reflect. And to think about the kind of world we want to live in.
Humanity is working together to fight this pandemic. It is encouraging to see how within weeks people have fundamentally changed their long-held habits like shaking of hands. It makes us hopeful that we as humanity have the ability to change other long-held habits and can start fighting many of the other long term crises the world is facing such as climate change and inequality. Together we want to build a better capitalism, a compassionate capitalism, driven by solving global problems.
For the countries we work in including Brazil, Colombia, Uganda, Kenya and India the pandemic could have horrifying consequences. Developing and emerging markets with densely populated areas and less developed healthcare systems will be even less capable to weather this crisis than Europe. Measures being advised globally, are simply not applicable everywhere.
What are we doing?
Since mid-last week, all the Yunus Social Business offices have moved into a remote working mode. We know that small and medium businesses will suffer the most. We have reached out to all our portfolio social businesses to understand how they are affected and how we can help overcome these challenges. We have also reached out to our corporate partners to understand how we can help them to alleviate this crisis and how we can build a more resilient society that is able to come together against pandemics, climate change or poverty.
We are tirelessly working with our partners to develop concrete measures that alleviate the pressure on social businesses around the world. If you would like to help support the social businesses in continuing their essential services in these difficult times, feel free to reach out to info@yunussb.com or Make A Donation.
Stay home and take care of each other.
Solene, our Communications Manager for the MAN Impact Accelerator speaks about the challenges faced by smallholder farmers and how they should be empowered rather than exploited by intermediaries, looking at examples from across our work at YSB.
Social entrepreneurs are incredibly busy people - but it’s important for them to take time out of the day-to-day to reflect and learn from each other. It’s not only fundamental to finance social entrepreneurs but to develop an eco-system where businesses focussed on impact are both supported and celebrated.
The first exciting announcement for us this year at Davos was the release of UBS’s World Economic Forum white paper “5 ways wealth managers can support the UN Sustainable Development Goals: our lessons from 2017” documenting innovative solutions to solving inequality.