"Required reading in Downing Street" was how The UK Times described "Enterprise Solutions to Poverty," a new report published by the Shell Foundation.

Since 2000, the Shell Foundation has been exploring systematically the questions of how to catalyze and scale-up market and enterprise-based solutions to poverty – and how to harness to the same task, the value-creating assets of multinational corporations

What the poorest developing countries absolutely need in order to make poverty history is the growth of enterprise," says the report.

"History demonstrates that a flourishing, responsible private sector, built on a broad base of enterprise... has been key to delivering the sort of economic growth in developing countries that we know pulls poor people out of poverty."

Using four case studies in Africa and India, the report explains how multinationals operating in the developing world can leverage their non-financial assets to address local development and move beyond traditional forms of CSR and social investment.

One case study looks at efforts to pilot and then scale up market-based mechanisms for reducing substantially the nearly two million extremely poor women and children who die every year from inhaling smoke from indoor cooking fires. Another explains how an innovative consumer financing mechanism funded and jointly launched by Shell Foundation, other donors and commercial banks has catalyzed rapid expansion of the market for solar home systems (SHS) among the underserved rural and peri-urban population in south India.

A third study explains the way a "social" merchant bank also operating in south India is using flexible finance, financial engineering skills and business development expertise to assemble a series of bankable, pro-poor energy and water infrastructure projects run at a profit by barefoot entrepreneurs with capital requirements as low as from $1000 to $20,000 dollars.

The fourth case study describes successful SME investment funds being piloted in Uganda and South Africa whose clients are entrepreneurs with little collateral and limited business experience, previously unable to access finance of any kind, for projects in the $10,000 to $500,000 range. Set up with local banks and supported by the skills and infrastructure of local Shell companies, more than 300 hundred SMEs have received finance and business training from these funds. More than a thousand jobs have been generated by the 170 enterprises in which investments were made, while the funds overall are delivering commercially attractive rates of return to investors.

The final section draws on the Shell Foundation experience – and the efforts of others working in a similar way – and calls for public partnerships to be recast along business lines.

Learn more and download the full report (pdf) at http://www.shellfoundation.org/main/main.html.