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In This Issue
Editor's Note
Why Strange Bedfellows Can Make Effective Partners
It doesn’t sound like a natural partnership: one of the world’s leading brewers and one of the biggest financiers of programs to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Yet SABMiller and the Global Fund found common ground—literally—by using local shebeens, or taverns, in South Africa to educate patrons about HIV.
In this week’s feature article, BSR’s Global Partnership Development Director Chad Bolick examines why seemingly different groups can make great partners to address global challenges such as health education. Using the examples of the Tavern Intervention Program and BSR’s own HERproject, Bolick explains how companies can adopt an approach to “partnership innovation” by engaging a variety of stakeholders, looking for resources that aren’t strictly cash-based, and applying corporate expertise to international development needs. Ultimately, Bolick points out, it’s not the partners that matter, but their ability “to work in the space between the groups’ overlapping interests.”
In a similar vein, we also highlight how innovative partnerships can be used to address access to medicine in the Global South and to create adaptation plans for the disruptions caused by climate change.
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In Depth
Partnership Innovation: It Takes a Supply Chain to Improve Women’s Health
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At BSR, we bring together nontraditional groups to solve critical sustainability challenges through programs that can stand on their own over the long term. Here’s how it works.
Read more →
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Spotlight
New Partnerships to Focus on Bringing Low-Cost Drugs to Africa
By Mark Little, Director, Healthcare, Advisory Services, BSR
With more Chinese life sciences companies expanding their research and development capabilities, these firms have an opportunity to supply much-needed medicines at a reduced rate for people in the Global South. To date, Chinese companies have focused mainly on domestic markets because of government incentives.
Given this opportunity, BSR is working with potential partners and the Chinese government to shift incentives, ramp up product-safety regulations, reduce barriers to entering new markets, and catalyze Chinese-led innovation related to health issues that prevail in both China and the Global South, including HIV, tuberculosis, and hepatitis.
Africa presents a notable opportunity because many Chinese companies (primarily in the extractives industry) have already developed relationships in the country. An initiative that focuses on health needs in Africa could also help change the mindsets of some stakeholders who have criticized Chinese companies’ and the government’s approach as representing a new wave of colonialism.
For more information on this topic and opportunities to join BSR in this effort, contact Mark Little.
Spotlight
Climate Adaptation Measures to Manage Risks and Create Opportunities
By Ryan Schuchard, Manager, Climate and Energy, BSR
With the increasing severity of storms and weather disasters, receding rivers, advancing deserts, and more frequent landslides, floods, and sinkholes, there's no question that the effects of climate change will test business' ability to deliver products and services.
But company leaders also will need to understand how climate change will affect their most vulnerable stakeholders—the poor, citizens of developing countries, migrants, and others—who face greater risks due to drought, disease, and displacement resulting from these challenges.
To prepare their business and stakeholders for climate change, BSR recommends that company leaders pursue adaptation measures:
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Develop a value chain model for assessing how climate change affects your business.
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Perform a financial analysis that compares outcomes both with and without adaptation measures.
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Identify the company’s greatest financial uncertainties, which can be used to recognize opportunities for working with peers and policy makers.
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Make a checklist of potential climate impacts that includes both long-term processes like sea-level rise and singular events such as storms—as well as options for addressing them.
For more on climate change adaptation, contact Ryan Schuchard.
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