World’s Largest Companies Get Together to Fight Inequality
Danone CEO Plans to Expand Inequality Fight With New Projects
(Bloomberg) -- A coalition of some of the world’s largest companies, including Danone, Unilever and Mars Inc., plans to expand projects aimed at fighting inequality.
The group of 40 companies, dubbed Business for Inclusive Growth, or B4IG, held its first board meeting on Monday to discuss ideas on how to tackle issues like gender equality or helping refugees enter the workplace. An incubator program will now seek to scale up more than five dozen projects that have received investment pledges of $1.4 billion.
The initiative is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which will work on providing a measurement tool to show projects’ impact. The group, led by Danone, pledged at the G-7 summit meeting in August to support inclusive growth and has since gained new participants like UniCredit SpA and Michelin.
“We see a responsibility to bring concrete changes in the way companies do business,” Danone Chief Executive Officer Emmanuel Faber said in an interview.
The list of initiatives includes Danone and Mars supporting small farms with low yields by introducing sustainable practices that boost revenue. Henkel AG and other German companies started a project that offers internships and training programs to refugees to ease their integration. A BASF SE plastic-recycling project in Nigeria aims to create as many as 15,000 jobs by 2025, of which 60% are planned to go to women. And Unilever is supporting networks of mobile shower services for the homeless.
“The hope is for these initiatives to inspire public policy,” Faber said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Corinne Gretler in Zurich at cgretler1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Anne Pollak
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