Fostering Inclusive Business Practices: Collaborations with Industry Leaders to Drive Socioeconomic Integration

This week we continued to brainstorm with business leaders and industry experts on opportunities and approaches towards integrating ‘inclusivity’ into company value chains. We also focused on mainstreaming inclusivity credentials into the evaluation criteria of business and industry awarding schemes, to ensure that inclusivity is a core component of business practices. The meetings took place with the leadership of the National Chamber of Exporters, the UN Global Compact Sri Lanka, SLASSCOM (The National Association of IT and BPM companies in Sri Lanka) and Biodiversity Sri Lanka.

An inclusive business is one that provides goods, services, and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis - either at scale or scalable - to people of lower socioeconomic status, integrating into business value chains as suppliers, distributors, retailers and customers.