It goes without saying, we are living through unprecedented times.
It goes without saying, we are living through unprecedented times.
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.
We took a holistic, expedient and humane approach to support smallholder farmers in Colombia
On 20 March this year, Luis Miguel Botero discovered that his social business, Pomario, faced an existential threat. It was the day that a nation-wide quarantine in Colombia was announced, which was ultimately extended until the end of August. For Botero, as for many business owners, this presented the threat that his social businesses’ revenues would disappear overnight.
How grant funding came in at exactly the right time for waste pickers in São Paulo.
Alexandre Furlan, CEO of Instituto Muda, has been building his business since he finished college 12 years ago. São Paulo generates 20,000 tons of waste on a daily basis. Yet only 5% of the residential buildings have public recycling collection service - the majority of it goes to landfill. Instituto Muda tackles the problem by picking and sorting recycled waste and donating it to waste
CURAFA™ integrated points of care: An integrated primary healthcare platform in Kenya
People in rural and peri-urban Kenya are lacking access to high-quality healthcare and medication. Less than 5% of Kenya’s GDP is spent on healthcare and only 17% of Kenyans have health insurance coverage. With 46% of the country’s population living below the poverty line, Kenyans are particularly vulnerable to financial catastrophe when facing health issues.
