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To give local and international businesses a new role in assuring inclusive growth in Africa, the African Studies Centre and the Netherlands African Business Council organized the two-day Africa Works! 2014 conference. They invited 740 representat...

When the Dutch private sector is involved in development in Africa, a dilemma may arise. The Dutch government claims that businesses could have a positive impact on local economic development on the continent in the longer term. But do their activ...

Social enterprises are not easy businesses to run. The challenge of retaining financial stability while utilizing commercial practices to actively develop social impact brings unique leadership and management challenges.

The stagnation in labour demand in the US is linked to the rise of finance. Strategies to encourage long-term employment growth must be found in that direction too.

Business training programs are a popular tool used by policy-makers to promote SME growth. However, recent evidence suggests that these programs rarely lead to firm growth or job creation. What do we know about how to effectively support SME devel...

In his 1963 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, the late US president John F. Kennedy expressed two ambitions for that decade: to commit to a manned moon mission and to end world poverty and hunger. On 21 July 1969, Apollo 11 landed on...

The US may be witnessing the beginning of a return to stakeholder capitalism.

By their excessive use of debt, private equity companies in the US increase the risk of bankruptcy of real economy companies they acquire.

Although Sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly attractive to investors, structural transformation and formal job growth remain slow. Industrial surveys in many countries show that some highly productive firms co-exist with many low-productivity busin...

Social businesses that operate in high-, low- and medium-income countries face five overarching challenges.

While establishing partnerships to have a greater social impact, social enterprises also face challenges.

Co-creation and combining the strengths of business ecosystems are the key to creating shared value.

If you want to make money and make an impact, you have to decide which of the two comes first, as landing in the middle is not easy.

The most imminent challenge of a social entrepreneur is a persistently misperceived friction between business and social goals, which is a concern for impact investors.

Effective total impact measurement can help social entrepreneurs to make better business decisions. However, many social enterprises are not yet measuring impact.

Interview with Ashok Khosla about the opportunities and challenges of social entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Social entrepreneurs forget that a big social impact also requires business scale, argues Robert van den Heuvel of DSM.

Rigid internal profit goals or lack of direct personal experience with BOP markets and their constraints are key to big companies’ ignorance to work with social entrepreneurs, writes Ashoka’s Al Hammond.

The private sector is the primary generator of sustainable employment, so governments need to work to ensure that the environment for growth is promoted and maintained.

Social entrepreneurship is booming, as is impact investment. However, the very specific raison d’être of these social ventures brings a whole new set of challenges. The most imminent of these is probably a persistently misperceived friction betwee...

In many countries the share of labour in national income has declined over the last three decades. As a result, the low and middle-income groups of people who depend the most on wages for their income are crumbling. Meanwhile, the rich elites who...

If one message should be taken from the European Development Days it is that the world will not be able to tackle its many future economic, social and ecological challenges without sustainable development partnerships.

When rethinking public aid as a catalyst for development-oriented private investment, several elements need to be taken into account.

Partnerships between the private sector and like-minded organizations are key to securing genuine and lasting change in global development.

The Broker had the pleasure to speak with Ashok Khosla, former director of the United Nations Environment Programme and winner of the 2002 Sasakawa Environment Prize, during the Springtij 2013 sustainability congress in Amsterdam. Our project edit...

Organizing a social enterprise is more a question of generating social impact than income, which puts it at odds with the standard idea of doing business. Therefore, social entrepreneurship needs a business strategy that goes further than making a...

Welcome to The Broker Dossier on Social Entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is increasingly popular as a way of doing business while achieving a social and economic impact. However, many questions still remain about what social entrepreneurs...

The concept of social entrepreneurship has been caught up in its own popularity and a variety of definitions have emerged. Amid the general confusion, four schools of thoughts can be distinguished, each of which emphasizes a different outcome (inc...

Editor in Chief Frans Bieckmann argues in this editorial article that social enterprises will only really succeed if they can operate in a global economic system that rewards them for being competitive on fair, social, and environmentally sustaina...

In their search to become more financially self-reliant development NGOs are experimenting with social entrepreneurship. Many are doing this to strengthen their financial situation, but social entrepreneurship can do much more and opens up new way...

If we want to increase jobs and reduce poverty, we must emphasize the private sector's role in development.

Only collective action can strengthen the inclusive business ecosystem and reach impact.

Creating shared value is a new concept to get private sector involved in building an inclusive economy. But how different it is from CSR?

Small business are crucial in creating an inclusive economy. But the World Bank’s Doing Business Report does not focus on the most important issues they face.

How can we create a more inclusive economy and what obstacles lie in the way? This debate seeks answers.

Sharing Dutch agricultural expertise in lcoal partnerships can positively contribute to the eradication of rural poverty. 

Improving market access, linking farmers to markets, developing inclusive value chains; these are popular but challenging activities among development practitioners. The challenges results from the limited capabilities of (small) farmers to produc...

Mining companies can contribute to the development of rural communities by encouraging and supporting local farmers to develop more productive activities, beyond their subsistence activities.

Netherlands-African Business Council (NABC) is activating the Dutch private sector for market development and knowledge transfer to local farmers in Africa.

When rethinking water and environmental policies for the coming years, the harsh consequences of water privatization must not be forgotten. 

Cooperation with private corporations is a serious threat to the human right to water.

Worldwide, companies have started to explore the water footprint of their products. The creator of the water footprint concept, Arjen Hoekstra, gives some background.

The impact of mining on the quality of water resources should be given a place on the global agenda.

Land grab is rarely challenged through a food security and food sovereignty perspective in research and policy elaboration, in spite of its multifarious impact on both of such key dimensions of human livelihood. 

Africa has the potential to be an agricultural power. However, the components of the value chain are delinked from one another, and there is a lack of creative investments, which could have spark-plug and catalytic effects on rural lives.

How to solve the growing global food crisis? A drastic shift is needed towards a sustainable, resource-efficient and climate-smart agriculture.

On 18 January 2025 the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) presented its report long-awaiting report that promotes substantial changes in the organisation of Dutch aid as well as more structural attention for global public goods.

‘A delicate business’ (The Broker 8) emphasized that corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are often insufficient for alleviating poverty. Key questions and issues raised in responses to the article are discussed here.

In the debate on how to combat poverty, policymakers frequently claim that multinational corporations can make a positive contribution by practising corporate social responsibility (CSR). But CSR initiatives are often no match for an issue as comp...