Welcome to Newsletter #1 of the B4IG coalition
In this issue:
B4IG’s governance & social media
Incubator news: Three projects addressing goods & services, financing & technical support, and training & employment
The OECD’s new Centre on Well-Being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunities
And more!
Welcome to the first edition of the B4IG coalition newsletter! As a member or partner of Business for Inclusive Growth, you’ll receive our monthly email with fresh information on how the B4IG pledge is being implemented.
We’ll have news from the B4IG Actions (Financing Forum, Working Groups, Incubator), our various partners and members, and the work on inclusive growth taking place at the OECD. At the end of each newsletter, we’ll also share interesting developments in the broad sphere of inclusive growth.
For future editions, if your organization has news that you’d like to share or if you’d like more information on any of the topics covered, let us know via email at contact@b4ig.org. (And please tell us what you think of this first newsletter, so we can keep iterating to make it better and better!)
B4IG Updates
Over the summer, there have been numerous B4IG developments, ranging from governance to our new online presence.
Gabriela Ramos has been appointed Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO. Congratulations to Gabriela, and many thanks for her leadership and passion since the very beginning of the coalition. Angel Gurria, Secretary-General of the Coalition, will co-chair the B4IG Board with Emmanuel Faber. Juan Yermo, who replaced Gabriela as OECD Chief of Staff on July 1st, will co-chair the operational committee.
On June 24th, the Board’s first 2020 touchpoint took place to share an update on the work program and look toward the future. It gathered over 80 CEOs and experts from all B4IG companies along with high-level partners. On November 12, the B4IG’s Annual CEO Board Meeting will coincide with the Paris Peace Forum. The meeting will take place both in person and virtually for CEOs and high-level partners. We’ll be sure to share the organizational details as soon as possible.
Finally, as you can see above, we’ve designed the new B4IG logo, and soon the new website will be live! We also recently created the B4IG LinkedIn and Twitter pages: please follow and feel free to boost B4IG posts through your own channels!
The Actions
Working Group 2 on inclusive workplaces has been focusing on several directions responding to current events. They're developing a position paper to be presented at the November board meeting on an inclusive COVID-19 recovery and how to address the impact of the crisis on the most vulnerable segments of the workforce; they're also holding specific sessions on the experiences of and improving outcomes for ethnic minorities. Then they recently launched a workstream on inclusive restructuring, the objective being to provide guidance to companies planning significant restructurings that will impact employment and local communities, to ensure that these are carried out in a responsible manner.
In the Incubator, the projects participating in the B4IG acceleration program are all working towards overcoming barriers to economic prosperity. They do so by giving access to three types of essential means: goods & services, financing & technical support, and training & employment. We’ll highlight each project over the coming newsletters, but here are three projects to serve as early examples from these clusters:
Passport for Inclusive Growth, by BNP Paribas and L’Ascenseur, is working on the challenge of making banking products more accessible for disadvantaged youth (Goods & Services).
The Partnership for Sustainable Coffee, by Keurig Dr Pepper and Root Capital, strengthens smallholder coffee farmers by filling financing gaps and providing training (Financing & Technical Support).
The Industry Academy, by L’Oréal and Adecco, aims at improving the employability of long-term unemployed people through a 1-year training program (Training & Employment).
To keep up with all the Incubator projects, be sure to follow B4IG on LinkedIn!
The Inclusive Growth Financing Forum (IGFF) organized three virtual dialogues in June, each one bringing together a different category of stakeholder: impact investors, G7 national impact initiatives, B4IG companies, and a handful of social entrepreneurs. The IGFF is now progressing toward the annual B4IG Financing Forum symposium, which will facilitate the exchange of expertise & best practices and act as an efficient marketplace for impact investors seeking new inclusive growth financing opportunities. We’ll have more information about the symposium and the marketplace in the next newsletter.
From the OECD
The OECD recently created the Centre on Well-Being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunities (WISE), with Romina Boarini appointed as Acting Director. Building on the legacy of OECD well-being and inclusive growth frameworks, the WISE Centre’s mission will include strengthening the measurement of well-being, inequality, inclusion and sustainability, as well as understanding the impact policies and business actions have on people today and in the future.
The OECD also announced that it will host the Secretariat of the new Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), aimed at bridging the gap between AI theory and practice in order to ensure that Artificial Intelligence is used responsibly, respecting human rights and democratic values. Born out of the Canadian and French G7 Presidencies in 2018 and 2019, the GPAI will initially comprise four working groups focused on responsible AI, data governance, the future of work, and innovation and commercialisation, bringing together experts from industry, government, civil society and academia to conduct research and pilot projects.
From the B4IG Members
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet has made public commitments on targets regarding the number of Blacks and Hispanic Americans as a percentage of total workforce and leadership, as well as renewed mandatory training around unconscious bias. Her updates on LinkedIn include specific targets and investments, a good example of how companies can use measurements to aim at outcomes.
Danone recently announced that they have been working with the IUF, the global federation of unions in the food industry, to pioneer an innovative approach called “FutureSkills”. The objective of this joint initiative is to support Danone employees who need new skills by offering them the opportunity to be trained and upskilled for the jobs of the future - either jobs that will require additional resources or new jobs that will become increasingly important. Throughout the training program, they will remain Danone employees and keep their benefits.
Microsoft has launched a new venture to provide training to 25 million people worldwide, focused particularly on the digital skills workers need in an economy affected by COVID-19 and on those hit hardest by job losses: those with lower incomes, women, and underrepresented minorities. The training initiative is also being backed up by $20M in cash grants to non-profit organizations worldwide.
The CEOs of B4IG members Accenture, JP Morgan, Microsoft and TIAA have also recently joined the New York Jobs CEO Council, with the mission of improving access to good, well-paying jobs for those who have been traditionally underserved - very much in line with what we do at B4IG, and yet another example of how collective inclusive growth initiatives are developing quickly at the local level as well.
Around the Globe
Ronald Cohen, member of the B4IG advisory board, has a new article out together with George Serafeim on How to Measure a Company’s Real Impact, in which they emphasize that “the era of impact transparency has begun.”
Frances Frei, who was called in by Uber in 2017 to address numerous workplace issues, has a new book out on changing corporate culture and how doing is more important than communicating. Her recent interview in Fortune is quite illuminating!
And finally, the Harvard Law School Forum recently published a discussion on how corporate directors can resolve the seemingly endless debate: Stockholders Versus Stakeholders—Cutting the Gordian Knot.
Thanks for reading - we’re looking forward to moving down the path to inclusive growth with you!
B4IG Team