The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are an initiative of Kofi Annan for reducing poverty and improving lives, which world leaders agreed on at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. The Secretary-General had already warned that the world is falling short in meeting these objectives. Commenting in the UN's Round Up Newsletter, Roberto Bissio of Social Watch Uruguay, said that "in order to capture the hearts and minds of the public...the MDGs still need to be translated from technical jargon into formulas that... can be readily understood by men and women in the street." 22

One way of doing this is to translate it into the context of small-scale enterprise. In November the Centre for Social Markets held its 3rd Annual Conference on Corporate Citizenship in Kolkata, India. 23 The focus of the two-day conference was on the role of small and micro enterprises in achieving sustainable development and helping to deliver the Millennium Development Goals. 24 The positioning of the lofty aims of the Millennium Development Goals alongside the world of small and micro-enterprises seems initially quite stark. However, the reality is that most businesses are small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) and they employ the majority of the world's population.

In this context the work of the International Labour Organisation (a member of the UN family) might be instructive. In the Autumn it began exploring the possibility of expanding its work on the social marketing of job quality in small and medium sized enterprises to Vietnam. Prior experience in Moradabad, India and the Kumasi region of Accra, Ghana, found that there are low cost ways of improving basic health and safety in the workplace of micro-enterprises. Moradabad is a region known for its numerous brassware artisans who work out of units in the family home. The introduction of colour coded trays was found to be an effective and cheap way to reduce workplace burns in the home units of the brassware artisans in Moradabad. The project was a joint initiative between ILO-SEED (part of the ILO's InFocus Programme on Boosting Employment Through Small Enterprise Development) and New Academy of Business. Working with local trade associations and groups of workers, they have has shown how these mechanisms can be marketed to the micro-enterprises by working with local culture and using local communications specialists. The media messages that were delivered during the social marketing campaign sought to convey the productivity and quality improvements that came from those small changes. This was something to which the men and women on the streets in Moradabad responded.25

Another sector known for its modest means, but with great potential for supporting transformation is the formal social enterprise sector. The sector has recently received some encouraging news from both sides of the Atlantic. Origo Inc. ran a series of events in San Francisco focusing upon the key issues in creating a social enterprise, such defining social impact, securing funding and 'being' a social entrepreneur. 26 In the US the sector is growing as reported in a Harvard Business School working paper by Jane Wei-Skillern and Beth Battle Anderson. 27 The paper explores the strategies for geographic expansion of non-profit organisations, reporting on a large-scale survey of nonprofit leaders, who are currently engaged in or seriously considering expanding their organizations by establishing branches and/or affiliates in new locations.

In the UK the sector is also making a bigger impact with a national newspaper reporting in a series of articles that small social enterprises are carving out a niche for themselves. 28 Meanwhile Co-operative News, the world's oldest co-operative newspaper, reported that the sector will become a "force to be reckoned with" in the next 20 years due to the its contribution to the economy and impact upon social well being. 29

This trend is being spurred in Britain with government proposals to launch a new legal form of company called a "Community Interest Company" (CIC). The Department for Trade and Industry has suggested that such enterprises, which will have to use their profits and assets for the benefit of the community and or wider public, will combine "entrepreneurial spirit with a sense of social purpose". The initiative has received support across a range of arenas. Fiona Mactaggart, the Minister for Racial Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal stated:

Community Interest Companies are an excellent example of how the Government can help communities help themselves. CICs offer a radically new way for organisations to pursue enterprise in the public interest, dedicating their profits to the public good, and creating real opportunities for people in areas where they are needed most."

The proposed legislation includes the suggestion that the Community Interest Companies should produce annual reports on the actions they have taken to pursue their social and community objectives and to involve stakeholders in this process. This has parallels to the calls from civil society to hold corporations to account for their social and environmental performance and the way these have become attempts by large companies to regain trust in how they do business.

Some commentators might consider the formal creation of a new institutional form for social enterprise as an indictment against the current institutional creation of "the corporation", which exists in a similar form in most capitalist economies today. If people in business require legal vehicles to facilitate the pursuit of the public interest, 'where it is needed most', what does this say about the state of the overall system and culture in which these companies operate? Some historical perspective on the history of the legal invention called "the corporation", and how during its 400-year history its form and regulation changed so that it no longer had to act in the interests of "the State" (or previously, "the Empire") might help us reflect on the implications of this initiative. Roger Warren Evans, a barrister-at-law, explores this growth of the modern cult of artificial personality, in The Rise of the Abroids. 30 Equally important would be to look again at the role of "limited liability" in shaping the practices of those in business. Such issues were discussed during a panel of a conference on corporate responsibility, organised by the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), and the argument made that the "DNA" of corporations - their legal ownership, liabilities, purpose and accountability - needed to be included in a broadened corporate citizenship agenda. 31