Browse by Theme: Livelihoods

A ground-breaking piece of development progress was marked last month when the World Bank updated its financial inclusion database and revealed that in the last three years alone, the number of people worldwide who have an account grew by 700 million, bringing the number of unbanked individuals down to 2 billion. The speed and scale of progress is staggering.

How much does the average high street shopper pay attention to where their clothes come from? If asked, most people wouldn’t think of Laos – but according to a 2012 World Bank report, even though Laos’ production of garments is still modest compared to some of its more competitive neighbours (China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam), garment production is the largest manufacturing sector in the country, with an annual turnover of $200 million. The sector employs more than 20,000 people in over 100 factories, and as with other low-cost garment-producing countries, most of the garment workers in Laos are young (17-25 years old), female (85%) and have migrated from the country’s rural areas. But do the pull factors of rural-urban migration translate into a better life?

Promoting gender equality is a core belief of the Cocoa Life programme. For years we have been working with partners including humanitarian organisations like CARE International to implement programmes that empower women in cocoa communities, writes Cathy Pieters, Global Director of Cocoa Life, Mondelēz International.

Post-war Sri Lanka (since 2009) has much to offer tourists, and the country is relying on the hospitality and tourism sector to drive up economic gains and create a positive ripple effect on related social factors – such as meeting the employment needs of several million young Sri Lankans on the look-out to secure a job. But why is it that so many women in the sector are not being supported in their careers – and why, in some cases, is it so hard for women to even enter the workforce?

The global negotiations to agree a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eradicate global poverty by 2030 will come to a conclusion this September. Many supporters of women’s economic empowerment have backed a petition urging governments to ensure women’s access to financial services is included, so what are the chances?

Many of us dream of a world free from poverty, but how can this be realistically achieved, especially for smallholder farmers who make up the majority of the world’s poor?

One important answer to this question is found in our new book, Making markets more inclusive: Lessons from CARE and the future of sustainability in agricultural value chain development. In it, we highlight lessons from one of the most intensely developed agricultural value chain initiatives in the world: CARE’s work in the dairy value chain in northwest Bangladesh.

I have just spent a few days in Dhaka talking to the Bangladesh Central Bank and a number of the key commercial banks in the country, as part of a research project into the role of banks in furthering financial inclusion. At CARE International, our focus is on the poorest people at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, and the research so far has posed a key question – what do we think of banks placing a strong emphasis on the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) market, rather than reaching further down the pyramid?