Doing Business with the World - Mapeo de Promotores de RSE

Development: New vision, new visionariesFor decades development has been the monopoly of selectedinstitutions. Universities and think tanks have controlled thestudy of development, and these rarely incorporate the rolesthat business does and can play. Governments and relatedorganizations such as the development banks have tried tocontrol the doing of development, and the civil servants inthese organizations rarely understand the roles and realitiesof business. Fortunately, both academia and governmentsare beginning to take a more business-centered view ofdevelopment. A good example is the World Bank’s regularDoing Business reports, which track how well nations andregions are doing in terms of creating the sorts of policyenvironments that let enterprise be a force for development.Visionaries have emerged, appropriately from the developingworld, who in their different ways offer models of bottom-updevelopment based on private enterprise development.Innovating financial mechanisms and marketpenetrations, and investments that flow to sectors thatenhance development priorities: The Grameen Bank,established by Bangladeshi economist MuhammadYunus, is one such innovative mechanism. The bank wasestablished to bring credit to poor people in poorvillages. With a repayment rate exceeding 99%, the bankthus far has loaned more than US$ 6 billion, helped build640,000 homes, sponsored more than 50,000scholarships and student loans, and changed the lives of80% of the country’s poor families. Grameen has recentlyexpanded into communications, nutrition and healthcare.The ideas of these visionaries dovetail neatly with the visionbehind the WBCSD’s Development Focus Area: business donein new ways can help bring sustainable development to all.Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto organized surveys ofcountries such as Egypt and the Philippines to show that“the poor” actually control huge percentages of thesenations’ total resources in the forms of their homes, shops,workshops and fields. He argues that the off-the-bookswealth of the poor in Egypt, if capitalized, would equal morethan 150% of all direct foreign investment in that country,including construction of the Aswan Dam and Suez Canal.But because the poor do not have deeds to properties thathave been in their families for generations, they cannot usethese properties for capital creation as entrepreneurs do indeveloped nations.In his book The Mystery of Capital, de Soto explains how verycomplex and subtle legal structures and processes, taken forgranted in the West, are largely absent in the developingworld, making the workings of capitalism very difficult. Heand other visionaries have identified some of the mechanismsthey believe could lead to increased development.Amartya SenEnabling frameworks: “By making assets fungible, byattaching owners to assets, assets to addresses, andownership to enforcement, and by making informationon the history of assets and owners easily accessible,formal property systems converted the citizens of theWest into a network of individually identifiable andaccountable business agents.”Muhammad YunusUnderstanding the local conditions and environment anddevising relevant sustainable solutions: Indian economistAmartya Sen has argued that freeing people helps themdevelop their own livelihoods, including the economicaspects of those livelihoods. Therefore, using his logic, byplaying a thoughtful, strategic role in development,companies are helping set people free.Hernando de Soto6