CENTER FOR BUSINESS
AS AN AGENT OF WORLD BENEFIT

Building self esteem, securing sustainable future, and creating abundance through the force of business is what defines Economic Development Imports (EDImports). The organization has been instrumental in leveraging the skills of women in the developing world to produce native products that could be sold in the developing world, thereby reducing poverty, insecurity and threat. What makes this different is the scale of the initiative that reaches out to multitude of artisans in the most remote parts of East and West Africa. By being a conduit to the beautiful products made by these women and their huge demand in the markets in the developed world, EDImports has provided the required impetus to pull the artisans and their families out of marginal socioeconomic conditions.

Women's World Banking's vision is to expand low-income women's economic participation by giving them greater access to financial information and markets. In doing so they are enabling women to not only keep their families fed but also engage in the community and develop a political voice that could bring about great change worldwide.

Honey Care Africa is an innovative, rapidly expanding Kenyan social enterprise established expressly to increase the income of rural farmers. To date, Honey Care has doubled the income of several thousand small scale farmers through its "Money for Honey" program, which trains them in commercial beekeeping and then buys their honey at a guaranteed price. Honey Care then packages and sells the highest quality African honey. The overall objective of the company is to produce and market high quality honey that will successfully compete on the world market with honey products from elsewhere. To achieve this objective the company has opted to work with the rural community groups in an out-grower model whereby it has introduced modern beekeeping methods using the Langstroth hives. In this approach, the company closely monitors the production process to ensure quality of honey produced by the contracted out- growers.

Bank ABN AMRO has made sustainability a cornerstone of its business. The bank strives to include a concern for social and environmental issues in the decision-making of every strategic business unit. These activities have gained such prominence that a special unit, the Sustainable Development Group was organized to coordinate sustainability work across the organization. The innovativeness of this sustainability mindset has led to numerous activities that are creating a shift in the impact of ABN AMRO on environment and society.

Cummins is a global power leader and family of four inter-related, yet diversified businesses that create or enhance value as a result of doing business with each other or having those relationships. It averages more than $6 billion in annual sales and is a technology leader in the diesel engine market, providing cutting-edge solutions to the increasingly difficult challenge of producing cleaner-running engines. Currently, Cummins clean diesel engines are powering transit buses in Southern China.

As the oldest and largest for-profit Fair Trade company in the U.S., Equal Exchange trades directly with 28 democratically run farmer co-ops located in 14 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Its mission is to build long-term partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relations between farmers and consumers and to demonstrate the viability of worker cooperatives and Fair Trade. They strive to build social and economic justice through the marketplace.

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide, but what if they could be linked into a power grid to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems? IBM asked this question and answered it in 2004 by creating the World Community Grid, a global humanitarian effort to harness unused computing power of individual and business computers and direct that power toward research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and Alzheimer's or improve forecasting of natural disasters. Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by dowloading the World Community Grid's free software and registering to participate.

A number of major financial institutions have come together to adopt a framework for determining, assessing and managing environmental and social issues in project financing. These global voluntary regulatory guidelines, the “Equator Principles” (EPs), are revolutionizing the way large projects are financed. Banks that adopt the EPs apply them globally to project financing in all industry sectors including mining, oil and gas, and forestry, and they make loans only to those projects whose sponsors aim to be socially responsible and environmentally sound.