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.
IKEA Foundation and Yunus Social Business carried out a 6-month joint research project, getting to the bottom of this question: With ever more organisations joining social-business ecosystems, how can we all start to plug the gaps in the support landscape?
Before Susan Mubiru bought a water purification system for her school, Namutebi Nkata Primary in Uganda, she had to find a way to boil water for all of her 516 students. “When we used to boil it, it was never enough. The children would not always have drinking water regularly”. For Susan, and schools across Africa lack of access to safe drinking water is a huge challenge.
We spoke to Molly Burke co-founder of Cycle Connect, our latest investment in our Ugandan Fund. Cycle Connect provides rural smallholder farmers with the necessary tools to propel them out of poverty.
As consumers, we are constantly demanding more. We want faster delivery, logistics and services to our door. To satisfy this demand, there is a huge focus in the investing space on “last mile” - finding the cheapest and most efficient way to serve the furthest to reach places. The last mile is the most expensive and time-consuming part of the delivery process
We have opened applications for our third cohort of the MAN Impact Accelerator and we are calling on European, African and Brazilian mobility and logistics social business startups!
The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes once famously noted that: “we have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less“. The act of listening as a means of truly understanding an entrepreneur is an important skill when it comes to tackling the challenges they face.