Earlier this year we took a group of philanthropists and partners to visit some of the social businesses in our portfolio in Uganda including Godson Commodities, Impact Water&Tugende. We also visited Kenya to see some of our pipeline companies. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet not only with the social entrepreneurs, but with the people whose lives have been changed with the products, services and higher incomes that the social businesses provide.

In 2022, Yunus Social Business (YSB) and Audi embarked on a journey of social procurement together with the intention to learn, innovate, and take the lead on using business as a force for good. Now at the start of the 2nd year on this journey, YSB speaks with Lukas Petersik of Audi to hear about his experience as a corporate intrapreneur striving to turn value chains into a force for good.

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.

This is for growth-stage businesses that seek to solve a social problem. We are looking for businesses that want to level up and become ready for investment. Social Businesses that seek to apply to the programme should be generating revenues of around US$250,000.