Mohammed Yunus: social business to meet social needs

Grameen Shakti (Grameen Energy) — we now sell 1,000 solar home systems per day.  We have now sold 1 million systems, which took us 16 years to do.  And it’s growing.  As the price of solar panels continues to come down, it becomes ever more competitive with other forms of energy.

This is a business, a social business.  As a business it must operate sustainably and efficiently, but the problem it seeks to solve is is a social problem — access to energy — but it’s a business that doesn’t pay any dividends to its investors.  We also partner with other companies for this — the first such partnership was with Danone, to provide nutritious yoghurt to poor children in Bangladesh.  It combined a lot nutrients lacking in Bangladesh, and it’s also delicious, so children actually want to eat it.  So now it’s helping children in Bangladesh to grow up healthy and strong.

We have many other joint ventures, for example, UniGlo (Japan) to provide low-cost sanitary napkins to women, or Intel Corp. to address risky pregnancies using software developed by Intel to evaluate whether the pregnancy is high-risk or not, and then be able to proactively avoid risk of death during delivery.  These are all social businesses.

And these social business joint ventures are operating all over the world — in Haiti, in Brazil, in Colombia, in each case collaborating with commercial entities.  In Germany, the mayor of the city of Weisbad proclaimed the city as a Social Business City.  Its social services are provided through social business.  Credit Agricole is working to launch a social business fund.

So social business continues to grow and I hope will continue to address social needs, but do so in a sustainable way.