• Enabling Business Culture

Policy makers strive to reform the business environment to render it more enabling for business development and success. This paper is looking at the question, if the culture of a society can enable or hinder the development and success of businessesand gives examples on how culture actually strongly influences attitudes towards business and business behaviour – which in the end leads to more or less business success and economic growth.

• Better access of SME to financing

Three issues need to be solved, in order to bring about a better access for SME to financing: The risks of SME themselves, the inappropriate legal framework and the low quality of financial services. But how to go about solving them? On the basis of her experience in south-eastern Europe, the author presents her experiences on solving one of the issues, the quality of financial services.In order to find the right interventions to bring about improvements, a number of criteria, indicators and benchmarks are suggested to lead the way and choose the appropriate interventions. The author also puts forward some ideas on which of the criteria and indicators are the most decisive ones.

• Developing rural service markets, taking into account cultural and social contexts and systems

This article makes the case for why to look at culture and values when building BDS markets. Values which are lying beneath our BDS supporting and BDS providing activities are analyzed and discussed and a closer look is taken at the cultural influence on transaction costs, which BDS interventions often aim to reduce. Cultures usually change and BDS interventions always cause a cultural change – to bring about a positive change, BDS should take culture into account in a conscious way. Tools for a broader cultural analysis, which can be used in a general BDS market study or which can be adapted to the baseline research for a specific BDS intervention are suggested.

Links to other papers by Karin:

For Enterprise Culture:

Enterprise Culture - Tool: A Resource Kit for Enabling Enterprise Culture (SEED ILO)
http://www.ilo.org/dyn/empent/

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The Resource Kit for Enabling Enterprise Culture has been developed to enable more effective intervention in enterprise culture on the part of development practitioners.
It provides guidance to ILO constituents (workers, employers and governments), staff and other stakeholders on how to work on:

• assessment of enterprise culture;
• analysis of enterprise culture;
• elaboration of intervention options for enabling enterprise culture;
• measuring impact of interventions in enterprise culture.

For FAMOS Check:
http://www.ilo.org/dyn/empent/docs/F845412677/FAMOS_Fact_Sheet_16.03.07.pdf

For BDS:
http://www.bdsknowledge.org/

For Microfinance:
http://www.unis.unvienna.org/

If you have any questions or points of discussion, please,contact me: karin.reinprecht@yahoo.de