As we, at Yunus Social Business, are tracking and seeing the devastating effect of the Covid-19 virus in the countries where we work, live and hail from, we have been wondering what are the best ways to use our assets.
The Corona pandemic will hit particularly hard the developing countries with harsh sanitary, social and economic consequences for their populations. The healthcare systems do not have the capabilities to address such a crisis while governments are unable to offer the social and economic policies to protect the most vulnerable individuals.
Hence we fiercely believe in the potential of existing solutions created by social entrepreneurs to prevent the Bottom of the Pyramid from the direct or indirect impact of Covid-19. Supporting the leaders who are racing to build new solutions, we aim to safeguard and accelerate the existing ones.
In addition to the action of social entrepreneurs, we stand by our claim that corporations should better understand, articulate, and act on their purpose. Now is the time to do so in the most meaningful way, by leveraging their assets and resources to contribute to solving the challenges we face as a global, connected humanity — challenges that are so vast & complex, no one can solve them on their own.
Tapping into our resources and love for networks, we are developing the 2 distinct responses :
We are delighted to be featured in the latest episode of the Global Goals Cast in the spirit of International Eradication of Poverty Day, celebrated last week, the episode asks: “Is it possible to #EndExtremePoverty”.
Yunus Social Business’s ‘Social Business Accelerators’ help corporates connect to exciting social entrepreneurs and engage their employees in unique mentoring experiences for social change.
On 24 March this year, day-to-day business for a vast number of Indian organisations stopped abruptly. With a complete nationwide lockdown, any operations requiring physical attendance had to shut down overnight. Here’s how we helped one of the Indian social businesses in our portfolio to overcome the combined economic and health crises of COVID-19.