Sustainable Development

Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals

The Cost of Cash to Ghana’s Cocoa Sector

Ghana is among the world’s leaders in the use of mobile money, but shockingly, the cocoa sector still pays upwards of 7 billion cedis (US$1.2 billion) every year in cash and checks to purchasing clerks, who then transfer it to farmers in cash. This means over 90% of the farmer transactions are still made in cash. Our organizations have released today new analysis showing that the costs and risk of cash to the cocoa sector are valued at more than $20 million every year, or more than 20% of turnover for all LBCs.
icon-content-article-grey

Fairtrade and the COVID-19 response – lessons for business and the food system

The rapid spread of COVID-19 and the resulting global restrictions, challenged everyone involved in the production of food all over the world. Fairtrade is no exception, working as we do with over 1.6 million farmers and workers supplying the UK’s supermarkets.
icon-content-article-grey

How to Safeguard the Livelihoods of Women Farmers and Entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Among its many impacts, the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to reverse recent gains to women’s economic empowerment. This article by TechnoServe Gender Director Cristina Manfre presents a strategy to ensure that the global community’s response to the pandemic safeguards against the risks to women’s livelihoods and enables them to help lead the economic recovery.
icon-content-article-grey

Youth Perspectives on Our Future Economy

As part of Business Fights Poverty Online 2020, we teamed up with youth from around the world from the Economy of Francesco to organise a co-creative session dedicated to imagining and evaluating future economic models and to begin to co-create our future together.
icon-content-article-grey

Three ways sustainable supply chains can help build better business in a COVID-19 world 

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world in profound and unexpected ways. The jury is still out on how severe and lasting the economic damage will be, or whether the pandemic will spur urgently needed action on climate change, rising inequality and sustainable development. One thing we can all agree on is that “normal” will look different going forward.  
icon-content-article-grey

What smallholder cotton farmers need to build financial and agricultural resilience

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, what actions can be taken by businesses, governments and supply chain partners to build resilience in smallholder cotton farmers to withstand future shocks? CottonConnect asked farmers in India and Pakistan what they needed, and makes recommendations for increasing agricultural, financial and market linkage resilience.
icon-content-article-grey

Which supermarkets are doing the most to protect the rights of food workers?

As the Coronavirus pandemic drives home the importance of the frontline workers producing and supplying our food, Oxfam’s Behind the Barcodes campaign to improve the conditions of people in supermarket supply chains is more relevant than ever.
icon-content-article-grey

New Ways of Thinking, Convening, Leading

WWF is supporting the Business for Nature Coalition in convening a major global leadership event on 15 June to address the vital role of nature in building a resilient future for everyone. This unique virtual event will bring together CEOs from five large multinational companies with the heads of key UN institutions in exactly the type of conversation and collaboration we need to grow in the coming months.
icon-content-article-grey

Fairtrade Calls for Full Sector Response to Shore up Cocoa Farmer’s Livelihoods Through the Crisis

I am really pleased to announce that, this week, we’ve launched our Cocoa Sustainable Livelihoods Landscape Study. Co-authored by Naomi Somerville-Large and Antonio Capillo at the Fairtrade Foundation, this study is published as part of our partnership with Cocoa Life – Mondelēz International’s global cocoa sustainability programme. 
icon-content-article-grey

Rebuild Better: How to Support Farmers and Workers Through the COVID-19 Crisis and Beyond

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for nations to ensure that the recovery plan for the Covid 19 crisis creates a fairer, more sustainable world, with six green ambitions at the heart of his proposed strategy. With nation states jostling up against each other it’s unclear how the new power dynamics will look once the dust has settled, and what the appetite or potential might be for this kind of unprecedented shared effort.
icon-content-article-grey

Closing the Living Income Gap for Farmers – From Theory to Practice

We know that farmers are earning revenues from cocoa that are far below what they need to enjoy a living income. The challenge we now face is how to change this? How can we assist farmers to grow their incomes and bridge the gap, and moreover, how might we build resilience and security into livelihood systems as we go?
icon-content-article-grey

What’s the Impact of Sustainable Farming on Smallholder Suppliers in Ethiopia?

In Ethiopia, the agriculture sector employs more than 70 per cent of the country’s population of 105 million people. Recently, Ethiopian farmers have been particularly vulnerable to the devastating impacts of the locust invasion affecting the country.
icon-content-article-grey

Sinead Duffy

During this podcast we hear from Sinead Duffy. Sinead is the Head of NGO Engagement at one of the world’s major life science companies focused on health and agriculture, Bayer. Sinead shares with us how business can support those most vulnerable during the COVID-19 global crisis
icon-content-podcast-grey

Don’t Allow the Coronavirus to Open Up Another Front

Healthcare workers are valiantly fighting, and too often dying, on the front lines in the global response to coronavirus. But what started as a health crisis could turn into a food crisis unless we take measures now. Preventing a food crisis is key to maintaining the strength to fight back.​
icon-content-article-grey

Covid-19: ‘We Won’t Get Back to Normal Because Normal was the Problem’

Discussions about the world that will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic have already started apace. Many commentators are wondering whether the crisis offers the opportunity to set the world on a more sustainable and equal path. The Covid-19 recovery offers an opportunity to create a different type of ‘normal’ – one that can help restore trust in the state and reaffirm crucial economic and social rights.​
icon-content-article-grey

Fairtrade Together: COVID-19 Briefing

Fairtrade is gathering updates from around the world about how COVID-19 is affecting producer organizations, family farmers, and workers.​
icon-content-article-grey

Cohabiting with a Virus: We Must Learn to Live Life on Land More Sustainably

The current pandemic crisis offers a chance to reimagine our approaches to managing natural resources, argues Martin Noponen of the Rainforest Alliance.
icon-content-article-grey

Why Off-Grid Energy Matters…And How it Can Matter Even More

Roughly 600 million people in Africa lack access to electricity. Off-grid energy solutions, such as solar home systems and mini-grids, are the most efficient way to provide energy to over half of these people. Although the impact of providing energy access on people’s lives – including through off-grid solutions – may seem obvious, it’s important to better understand and quantify exactly what this means. Because it’s through this detailed understanding of impact that we can become better investors.
icon-content-article-grey

Living Income: A Story From Measurement to Impact

Everyone has the right to a living income. Yet, as we move into a new decade, there are still around 500 million smallholder farming households globally, comprising a large proportion of the world’s poor living on less than $2 a day. Something needs to change. ​People have been trying to measure and tackle poverty for decades, so why reframe the issue now by measuring living income?
icon-content-article-grey

Why ESG is Core to Long-Term Success in Venture Capital

Venture capital (VC) is a relatively new asset class but is already having a transformative impact on large sections of the global economy.
icon-content-article-grey

What do we mean by "Sustainable Development"?

Join us in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals to combat poverty through innovative and scalable solutions that drive global progress.

Sub-topics within this category