Successes: Yogurt in Bangladesh

Kale at the Poverty News Blog (left) reports:

Paul Bennett is a business innovation consultant who goes to corporation boardrooms to give them creative ideas. For inspiration, Bennett recently visited Bangladesh and Professor Muhammad Yunus. Bennett not only wanted to talk to to Yunus about Grameen Bank, but also on their cooperation with Dannon Yogurt.

Yunus and Dannon create a vitamin packed yogurt at a low price that even the poor children of Bangladesh can afford. Dannon and Grameen run the company so that all profits go back into the company to maximize the benefit to the people of Bangladesh.

In his essay for the Financial Times, Bennett says there is a lot to be learned from this cooperation.

Then there is the Grameen-Danone collaboration, which started after Frank Riboud, chief executive of the French company, met Prof Yunus in 2005. Again, scale is an overwhelming theme: a tiny, "cute" factory (as Prof Yunus describes it), a 10th the size of a regular Danone plant, which makes a batch-produced, nutritionally complete yoghurt product, using local milk, collected jug-by-jug in rural villages - as I saw for myself. It is sold door-to-door by Dan-one's yoghurt ladies and marketed cleverly by a man in a Danone-branded lion suit teaching children the value of a nutritious diet.

He then also confirms that, yes, this does make money, but it does something more important as well:

It makes money but it also ignites employees' passions and teaches them new ways of working. In its collaboration with Danone, this philosophy is reaping more benefits for both than the purely financial.