Become a member
Join FABCOS today
Become part of a growing number of corporate's that together with FABCOS are working to find a profitable balance between:
- The legacy of our past and the demands of a prosperous future
- The incompatible characteristics of the informal and formal
economies of SA - Established traditions and new ways of doing things
- Township, rural and suburban dynamics
Corporate Membership
“We cannot escape the fundamental question: Whom and what is business for? The answer once seemed clear, but no longer. The terms of business have changed.”
Charles Handy
“Like the tip of an iceberg, the opportunity remains invisible to the corporate world.”
C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart
The Base of the Pyramid (BOP) concept champions new thinking and new ways of doing business in the world’s poor markets. While this high-level aspiration is not necessarily new, the current concept, also known as B24B (business-to-4-billion), was coined by influential business academics C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart a few years ago in a working paper, which then became a series of important and well-cited articles.
These authors made the simple yet powerful observation that 4 billion people remain outside of the global market system. The BOP concept frames this stunning fact as both a tremendous need and real opportunity for corporations. The BOP represents a vast, unexploited, multitrillion-dollar marketplace. For companies struggling with maturing markets, floundering business models, and serious questions about who their customers of the future will be, these are important markets to crack. But tapping into these overlooked markets will require companies to reconfigure their business assumptions, models, and practices.
The downsides to ignoring these untapped markets are also enormous. Conditions are dangerously ripe for disruptive technologies and ideas to emerge from the BOP, although it may be hard for large incumbent companies to see or believe this at present. Many things could accelerate this development. One scenario is a wave of sustainability-driven creative destruction, promulgated by a combination of top-down forces (regulation, new norms) and bottom-up forces (public perception, social action, new entrants, technologies) that would force companies to radically rethink their ecological footprint.2 Indeed, Peter Schwartz’s forthcoming book, Inevitable Surprises, counts rapid climate change as being a “given” in the next decade.
From a societal perspective, the downsides to not addressing these failures of development are becoming poignantly clear as well. As Joseph Stigliz wrote in his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, “Globalization today is not working for many of the world’s poor; it is not working for much of the environment; it is not working for the stability of the global economy.” At a fundamental level, something is awry with our current global system. More than ever, then, a positive future for the planet depends on a new paradigm that links business and development and promotes social, economic, and environmental stability around the world. Business, broadly defined, is a dynamic process of value creation; one high-leverage approach is to tap these intrinsic virtues to ensure ecologically sound wealth-creation opportunities at the BOP level.3
Why become a member as a large company?
One of FABCOS’ strategic objectives is to facilitate interface and interaction between small business and established corporate businesses in the economy. Large companies that do business in townships and rural areas or those that are planning to enter these markets are encouraged to enlist as members of FABCOS. There are three levels of corporate membership, each which a set support mechanisms for large companies:
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