Use social business to achieve MDGs

Experts urge countries on Social Business Day

Bangladesh yesterday celebrated the second Social Business Day along with a dozen countries, urging all nations to use the new economic theory to speed up efforts to reach millennium development goals.
All nations across the world have only less than five years to reach eight internationally agreed targets on poverty, hunger, maternal and child deaths, disease, inadequate shelter, gender inequality and environmental degradation set in 2001.
And in some areas, experts said, the picture is not very bright -- not only in Bangladesh but also in the rest of the world.
“We are doing well in some areas of MDGs, but not in all areas. We have to achieve the goals, but we have not enough time left,” said Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
The anti-poverty champion said Bangladesh has gained a significant achievement in the last few years in terms of eradicating poverty. “We are ahead of many countries that are pushing hard to achieve the goal.”
“But in areas like cutting rate of maternal mortality we are lagging behind. It is a shame for a civilised society to accept that women are dying while giving birth to a child. It could be avoided,” said the 2006 Nobel peace prize winner.
“We cannot accept it. We have the capacity to stop it,” said Prof Yunus, whose Grameen Bank is credited with empowering millions of Bangladeshi women through microcredit.
His comments came at the inaugural ceremony of a daylong event organised to mark Social Business Day along with 12 countries across the world.
Yunus Centre, a hub of social business movement, organised the event at Sonargaon Hotel in the city, in association with Grameen Telecom Trust, Bangladesh-German Chamber of Commerce and IHS Alliance Fibreglass.
The event aimed at listening to the latest developments in social business around the world, and the know-how to use the concept to help people create their own ventures to fight social problems, organisers said.
The theme for this year's event is “achieving the millennium development goals through social business”.
Top officials of social business ventures from around the world, anti-poverty activists, economists, politicians, civil society members, academics and students took part in the event.
Despite all confusions and criticisms, the social business concept is well set to win, thanks to its sheer simplicity and transparency, said Dr Yunus.
“It is a simple idea and will attract more and more people from around the world,” he said. “The business is not about money. The essence of it is creativity and innovation.”
A social business is a non-loss and non-dividend company where investors can recoup their dividend but nothing beyond that. All profits will be used to improve the products and services offered, and/or to stretch the reach of the company.
Prof Yunus, also the microcredit pioneer, has developed the concept of social business, a type of business dedicated to solving a social problem.
“Social business is your capacity to change the world,” said the economist.
Thomas Stelzer, UN assistant secretary-general for policy coordination and inter-agency affairs, Saori Dubourg, president, regional functions and country management, Asia Pacific, BASF, Corinne Bazina, chief executive officer of Grameen Danone, Hans Reitz, founder of Grameen Creative Lab, Masaharu Okada, executive director of Grameen Creative Lab at Kyushu University in Japan, Rokia Afzal Rahman, president of Bangladesh Federation of Women Entrepreneurs, also spoke.