BSR Insight Archives: 2010 09
September 28, 2010
Conflict Minerals: Risk or Responsibility?
"Blood phones … an ugly paradox of the 21st century." That's how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently characterized the challenge of so-called "conflict minerals"—tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold—that are mined from war-torn regions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and used in the supply chains of the high-tech industry for mobile phones and other products.
In This Issue
September 21, 2010
Advancing Social Investment in China
At last week's launch of BSR's new CiYuan initiative, representatives of the business, nonprofit, foundation, and government communities gathered in Beijing to create a new model for strategic philanthropy that helps the private and nonprofit sectors collaborate to address the root causes of social and environmental challenges.
In This Issue
September 14, 2010
The Other Drug Trade: Making Medicine More Accessible
After exploring ways to increase access to financial products and services last week, we now turn our attention to the access debate in a different sector: pharmaceuticals.
In This Issue
September 7, 2010
Expanding Access to Financial Services in ‘Unbanked’ Markets
In 2008, when the Australia-based bank ANZ launched a pilot program to offer a mobile banking and payments service to garment workers in Cambodia, workers in Phnom Penh were sending 5 million remittances annually to family members in neighboring provinces—an informal banking practice that cost them an average of 2.6 percent of the transfer amount each time they transferred money.
