What Fair-Trade Needs to Do Next

Where do we go from here? What's the next step of this social enterprise movement? Well, this is a stat that I came across in researching my book, which really shocked me, which is that the biggest 2000 companies in the world spend $12 trillion on goods and services annually. 12 trillion. By comparison, the GDP of all of Sub Saharan Africa is 1.8 trillion. This is money spent on everything from the rugs in the conference room, to the coffee in the lunchroom, to the raw materials in the batteries of our cell phones. If we could impact just a little bit of this spending and have it go to social enterprises that actually lift people out of poverty and measure their success doing that, how much better would the world be? We could lift millions of people out of poverty directly by ensuring or by encouraging companies to allocate just a small percentage of their existing corporate spend to social enterprise. I think the potential, especially in B2B, especially with organizations like Samasource, which serve large enterprises, is really huge. And most of the ethical consumption movement has to date focused on consumers. When you look at fair trade brands, for example, most of the emphasis is on consumer goods like coffee and chocolate. When we start thinking about the enterprise, the numbers become astounding. Right? $12 trillion. The entire global aid budget is less than 40 billion annually. So this is where the real money is, and this is where the transformation is going to happen in the next 10 years. It's in the way that corporations do business. We've put together the beginnings of a guide to corporate procurement officers to find ethical suppliers for everything from fibers and clothing, like cotton fibers to chocolate and coffee, that their employees might want. And my hope is that this give work movement really touches more and more people who have the power to influence how corporate corporations work.