Go far, go together: how multinationals and social enterprises can team up to replicate impact in women's empowerment

Cracking open a cold Coca-Cola is a moment enjoyed by people all over the world: the Coca-Cola Company sells over 500 still and sparkling beverage brands in more than 200 countries at a rate of upwards of 1.8 billion servings a day. Not only do people in every corner of the globe enjoy the beverages as refreshment, but the company also creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and business opportunities for farmers, suppliers of goods and services, manufacturers and bottlers, artisans, and many others.

Coca-Cola realized that especially in developing and emerging markets, many of the small enterprises it depends on to operate and grow are owned or managed by women. Women are also the primary buyers of Coca-Cola products.

With women being so central to their business and growth, Coca-Cola strives to remove special hurdles to business entry and growth faced primarily by women: low levels of business skills, lack of access to finance, and limited networks of peers and mentors. This commitment to empower 5 million women entrepreneurs by the year 2020 is called the 5by20 program.

Endeva co-founder and director Aline Kraemer recently organized a workshop together with Coca-Cola during the BOP World Convention in Singapore. The interactive workshop focused on how multinational corporations like Coca-Cola can better engage with social enterprises – particularly those led by women. Representatives from social enterprises and multinationals found that they can both benefit from working together: Multinationals can be a vehicle for growth for social enterprises, offering access to resources or established distribution channels. Social enterprises, in turn, often find very innovative solutions and are deeply rooted in local communities – both assets for companies that are far removed from the realities on the ground.

This has important implications for replicating business models: it’s much more effective to piggy-back on existing structures and work together rather than build from the ground up, especially in low-income markets. Coca-Cola already has a strong local community presence in the over 200 countries in which it operates, but can leverage partnerships with local organizations to deepen their existing ties or forge new ones. Thus, partnerships between multinationals and social enterprises can help companies like Coca-Cola gain access to women entrepreneurs around the world that can convert the opportunity of forming part of the company’s value chain into real impact for themselves and their families.

The author would like to thank Jackie Duff at Coca-Cola for her inputs and feedback on this blog post.