Report of the speech made by Emmanuel Marchant, Deputy General Manager of danone.communities, at Ecole de Paris in May 2011.

"In late 2005,Franck Riboud, CEO of Danone, and Muhammad Yunus, president of the Grameen Bank and Peace Nobel Prize 2006, discovered that their ideas come together on the development of poor and decided to form a joint venture, the Grameen Danone Food.
From 2007, a plant produces yogurt fortified with micronutrients in Bangladesh. The same year, Danone and Credit Agricole decided to create an original financial tool: the Fund danone.communities. It aims at supportting the construction of other plants in Bangladesh, to launch other projects in the same spirit in the world, to develop partnerships with local actors or NGOs, and to gather in a community who want to contribute the development of social business, either as actors or as investors of a new genre. Thus was set in motion a dynamic that reinvents the dual economic and social project of Danone and has implications for the management of the company itself."

To read more (in french only) :

Emmanuel Faber is Vice President of Danone and a member of the Board of danone.communities. Totally involved in the promotion of social business to other large companies, he delivers in his latest book "Chemins de traverse" a few keys,  anecdotes and questions notably about its commitment to Prof. Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize 2006, the same year that the project was launched Grameen Danone Foods Ltd.

Franch press have shared some words about this book. Here are some extracts.

Created in 2007 through the project Grameen Danone in Bangladesh, danone.communities has now an extended playground : India, Senegal, France… Indeed, in 2011, 5 social business projects are on their way, with the support of danone.communities and its team.

The reputation of its action is quite wide but many people was used to tell: “It’s not easy to find information about the projects!”.  This comment meant that they did not know the website exists… and even they would have known it, the information was not clear enough.

In addition, the website has a register space that allows people to subscribe and become a member of the social business community… but people still used to say:”Okay, I’m part of the community as a register member of the website, but what does it mean, concretely?”.

When realizing these things had to be improved, danone.communities took the reins of its website to make it better and give it all meanings again.

Then, there were two challenges:

-         Communicating more clearly about the actions of danone.communities and the projects.

-         Giving more value to the community, online.

This week, discover how we decided to communicate more clearly about the actions of danone.communities and the projects !

Last week, our team had the chance to participate in a major event of 2011:

Ashoka, as a pioneer and leader in the field of social entrepreneurship, has supported about 3,000 social entrepreneurs over the last 30 years. More than 1,000 people gathered on June 21-22 to celebrate this great anniversary.