Free Resource Guide on Inclusive Business

This week Business Action for Africa and its partners are hosting a series of events in Cape Town focusing on the important connections between business and development in Africa. The first of these will look at “inclusive business models” that expand access to goods, services and jobs amongst low-income communities through company value chains, with a particular emphasis in this event on the challenges and solutions of financing business investments of this sort.

As a supporting document to the event, the organizers have published an Inclusive Business Resource Guide, that presents an overview on the key publicly available tools and resources that support the initiation, development and scaling of inclusive business models. Given the specific focus of the Cape Town event on access to finance, the last segment of this document contains a special section featuring interesting resources on financial inclusion.

The Guide was originally developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and Beth Jenkins of the CSR Initiative, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, with input and review by the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF), Business Call to Action, UNDP, the Business Innovation Facility and Business Action for Africa. The document was initially prepared for an event co-hosted by these organizations in New York, September 2010. See http://www.inclusive.businessfightspoverty.org for more information on this previous event, and for more resources on inclusive business.