Caroline Ashley

Caroline focuses on how innovative economic models can deliver more inclusive and resilient development.

Caroline has worked on markets, business models and investment approaches that deliver social impact for many years in roles with challenge funds, impact investors, entrepreneurs, corporates, NGOs and policy makers. As Results Director of the DFID Business Innovation Facility, and Sida Innovations Against Poverty programme, she founded the Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business in 2010, then took on hosting it, and acted as Editor of the Hub for 7 years before it transitioned into InclusiveBusiness.net managed by IBAN.

Most recently Caroline led economic justice programmes at Oxfam GB, before moving to Forum for the Future, to lead global systems change programmes to accelerate our transition to a sustainable future.

Introducing a New Database of Inclusive Business Publications

Innovation
27. Jan 2016

If you search Google for ‘inclusive business’ you get 46.5 million results in under a second. But it would take you years to get through them. And if I search for inclusive business solar, or inclusive business models, or inclusive business Malawi, you find some good stuff and some not.

So what would you do if you wanted to find what’s been produced on inclusive business (IB) models that scale, on IB in Water in India, or to find specific checklists that help you and your team? From today you can search a new database of inclusive business publications at www.searchinclusivebusiness.org

One of the problems in our IB space is that sharing lessons and learning from each other is quite hard. But there is actually some very good stuff written down. There are some great sector reports that compare models, some revealing case studies (yes really, not just the ‘blah’ case studies), and a growing range of tools and checklists. The core reports from Monitor, IFC, SNV, Business Fights Poverty, Endeva and the Hub itself… all add up to a core set of wisdom on IB. But there are a host of others worth looking at too.

So go and explore the new database.

Launched today, the database, at www.searchinclusivebusiness.org, brings together over 1,300 reports, case studies, tools and fact sheets relevant to inclusive business from a wide range of authors and organisations.

It’s an easy to use, online solution allowing users to find the publication they are looking for within a few clicks, searchable by region, sector type and year of publication and topic. Topics cover a wide range of issues relevant to inclusive business such as serving Base of the Pyramid (BoP) clients, sourcing from the BoP, finance for inclusive business, women’s empowerment and results measurement and impact.

The database is the culmination of six months’ work by the Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business and the Inclusive Business Action Network in collaboration with Ashoka Mexico and Central America, consulting with key stakeholders and scouring the internet to pull together the most significant English-language publications on inclusive business in recent years, and a good start to a Spanish collection.

Search for a particular sector or region or simply browse the featured listings, and explore the largest array of inclusive business publications on the internet today at SearchInclusiveBusiness.org.