CEBC has welcomed and met with Mr. Casper Sonesson, Officer in Charge of the Private Sector Division, UNDP Headquarters together with Mr. Mounir Tabet, Country Director of the UNDP in Egypt, on a roundtable discussion, in December 2008, on the occasion of launching the UNDP new report entitled “Growing Inclusive Markets (GIM)”.

The Report was officially launched by the UNDP Administrator in July 2008 and since then a series of local launches have taken place in various countries. The official local launch of the GIM Report took place in Cairo on the 3rd of December at the Ministry of Investment.

Mr. Sonesson met with the Chairman and some members of the Canada Egypt Business Council to discuss some important issues as well as to clarify the main aim of the GIM Report which is a multi-stakeholder initiative aiming mainly to raise awareness and disseminate information on how businesses, often in collaboration with government and civil society, can contribute to human development and the Millennium Development Goals.
The discussions focused on the new initiative led by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) which is in the race to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, the greatest untapped resource is the private sector. The GIM with an unprecedented coalition of thinkers and actors in the fields of business, academia and human development, is designed to make a substantial contribution to both business strategies and human development by offering mapping tools and a strategy matrix, distilled from a broad pool of case studies.
Mr. Sonesson then gave a presentation highlighting the importance of the exploration of new areas for collaboration between UNDP and private sector in Egypt stating that more needs to be done to generate and assemble information and analyses of the markets of the poor, to better understand inclusive business models that create value for all and to identify innovative strategies for doing business with the poor.