Shell Foundation : Enterprise Solutions to Scale
Shell Foundation is an independent charitable foundation that was established by Royal Dutch Shell in 2000 to catalyse scalable and sustainable solutions to global development challenges.
It applies business thinking to a range a range of social and environmental issues linked to the energy industry – harnessing links to its corporate founder where possible to deliver greater development impact.
An ‘Enterprise-based’ Approach
The magnitude of global poverty requires solutions that reach billions rather than millions of people. Yet finding solutions that are effective on this scale is extremely difficult.
We believe that “enterprise-based solutions” are by far the most efficient way to generate development impact at scale in ways that are independent of charitable aid or subsidy in the long-term.
For us this means finding innovative ways to:
- identify the market failures that prevent products and services with the potential to support sustainable development from reaching the poor
- co-create new business models with long-term ‘social enterprise’ partners, both for-profit and non-profit, to service these markets, and
- provide “more than money” business development support to help these partners develop the skills, capacity and incentives to operate at scale and achieve financial independence.
We believe that creating pioneers and building new markets can remove barriers to development – and contribute to sustainable employment and equitable economic growth.
Targeting Scale and Sustainability
By learning from both success and failure since our inception, Shell Foundation has evolved a new model to deliver sustainable impact at scale.
We now have several long-term strategic partners that serve large numbers of people across many countries and continents, addressing markedly different development challenges such as sustainable job creation, urban mobility, access to energy, clean cooking and sustainable supply chains.