BSR Insight Articles About Economic, Social & Cultural Rights

Bringing Access to Finance to Supply Chain Workers

Chhavi Ghuliani, Manager, Advisory Services

Approximately 2.5 billion adults do not use formal financial services to save or borrow money, and 90 percent of them live in the developing world. Companies across all sectors can work through their supply chains to address barriers to access by offering financial education programs and products through automated payroll and direct deposit schemes. This can ensure that workers are paid the right amount and at the right time, and prevent fraud that sometimes occurs in factories and erodes take-home pay. Read more →

Posted: June 21, 2011 | Topics: Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Financial Services

New Partnerships to Focus on Bringing Low-Cost Drugs to Africa

Mark Little, Director, Healthcare, Advisory Services

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. Read more →

Posted: May 31, 2011 | Topics: Community Engagement & Development, Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Health Care

The Human Face of Water-Related Risk Assessments

Linda Hwang, Former Manager, Research

At the CEO Water Mandate meeting in Copenhagen last week—which focused on corporate water disclosure—one participant reminded us of the connections between water, healthy populations, and corporate performance. Despite the growing number of  tools to help investors and companies assess water-related risks, companies will miss a critical factor when evaluating their long-term risks if the tools do not link physical-, regulatory-, and reputational-risk frameworks to people’s ability to participate in the growth of healthy economies. Read more →

Posted: May 24, 2011 | Topics: Community Engagement & Development, Economic Development, Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Strategy & Integration, Supply Chain, Water

Water as an Unequal Human Right

A recent posting on Visualizing.org—a creative community that provides graphical representations of data on complex issues—looks at the differences in how "consuming" countries and developing countries use water and are affected by the lack of clean water. The visual representation—created by Tuduyen Nguyen and Cameron Reynolds-Flatt—was created to encourage people to conserve water resources by pointing out facts such as the number of bottles of water consumed each year in the United States and the percentage of the world’s population that lives without basic sanitation. Read more →

Posted: May 17, 2011 | Topics: Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Environment, Water

Building Effective Local Content Strategies

Jessica Davis Pluess, Manager, Research

BSR's new report highlights some of the challenges and opportunities extractives companies face in building local content programs that drive commercial value and deliver sustainable local development benefits in countries where they operate. Read more →

Posted: March 29, 2011 | Topics: Community Engagement & Development, Economic Development, Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Energy, Human Rights, Mining, Stakeholder Relations, Strategy & Integration, Supply Chain