Transforming Green Businesses into IGB

Inclusive Green Business is distinguished from green business by the deliberate design for BoP impact and for results for society. A firm that emphasises environmental impact alone has not, by that fact, become an IGB.

An IGB model has to be designed to do six things:

1. Address pollution and circular production.
2. Ensure sustainable management of natural resources, including energy.
3. Reduce the company’s climate footprint.
4. Scale the relevance of the line and its contribution to systemic environmental change.
5. Make money with environmentally sound practice.
6. Create social solutions for the BoP through the environmental and climate features of the business.

Among the accredited lines, the environmental and women-empowerment features are recorded separately from the basic IB or IGB classification. Women-empowerment here means a change in women’s agency. It does not mean only that women are engaged, or that a woman owns the business. Chart 5b marks which accredited lines carry an environmental-sustainability feature.