Inclusive Business Sweden serves as a platform for creating awareness of inclusive business, facilitating collaboration between organisations, as well as for connecting and supporting organisations to create opportunities associated with the BoP.

inclusive-business-sweden

Purpose

Inclusive Business Sweden is the Swedish national center for the advancement of inclusive business initiatives with the “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP) – the 4,5 billion individuals living on under $8 a day. These 4,5 billion represent an immense economic opportunity, entrepreneurial capacity, untapped source of business growth and exciting opportunity for business to contribute to global development goals and poverty alleviation.

The BoP is also used to describe a business strategy that focuses on meeting this segment’s basic needs by engaging them as consumers, producers and entrepreneurs – this is often termed “inclusive business”.

Growth Mechanism

As growth in mature markets begins to stagnate, many businesses are now turning to the BoP market as an untapped source of growth. Even for basic-needs products and services such as food, water, energy, health, IT and transportation, the market potential has been estimated at a value of $5 trillion3.

The telecommunications and micro-finance industries have been the first to see tremendous success from these ventures. Many large businesses are leveraging their BoP strategies to simultaneously grow their businesses while playing a role as good corporate citizens by helping to meet the basic needs of the BoP. Firms such as Unilever, Danone, Microsoft, Vodafone, Nokia, Schneider Electric and Philips have been quite successful in applying these strategies.

Concept of Inclusive Business

The concept of Inclusive Business with the BoP was originally described by C.K Prahalad, in the book The Fortune At The Bottom of the Pyramid. According to Bill Gates, this model “provides an intriguing blueprint for how to fight poverty with profitability.”