Our vision is to turn poverty into prosperity through supporting progressive business and industries.

Prosperity Initiative has a mission to create a public interest social enterprise which maximises a bottom line of poverty reduction over the long term. We plan to do this by supporting the development of progressive business and industry.

Our Business is Sector Based

Prosperity Initiative's long term goal is to develop a small number of market sector support programmes based on a 10 year+ strategy. A Prosperity Initiative market sector strategy is based on the demonstrated opportunity for new and increasing global market share coupled with the natural, competitive market linkages of the poor to this growth.

The Bamboo Sector - A Global Opportunity

Prosperity Initiative’s work began in the bamboo industry. The bamboo technology frontier has been dramatically expanded to new timber and fibre substitute products from the traditional products of bamboo furniture and handicrafts. This has been led by Chinese business and government collaborations over the past 2 to 3 decades. Competitive global market share for these new processed bamboo timber and fibre substitutes is accelerating. The global bamboo market is around $12B/annum*, primarily comprised of traditional products. There are multiple new high value products including pressed bamboo, panelboard, bamboo fibre, veneer, activated carbon and others with market competitive opportunities in vast global markets. Since its emergence 5 years ago, pressed bamboo is now $0.3B/yr of a $100B/yr global hardwood product market and growing at a dramatic 150%/yr, with over 120 factories in China**.

With over 37M ha of bamboo and over 1B people in mostly poor communities economically linked to bamboo around the world, the long term opportunity from pressed bamboo and multiple other bamboo technologies is signficant.

Prosperity Initiative's Bamboo Services

Our work has been launched in the Mekong region, focusing on Viet Nam. Geographically this enables linkages with business, technical and policy expertise from the global leader, China. These linkages are central to building business and policy capability in countries with nascent bamboo sectors.

Prosperity Initiative has recognised that in the global bamboo sector there has not been a formal, readily accessible offering of the leading expertise to enable businesses and governments to adopt new opportunities and practices in the sector.

Prosperity Initiative is now working with the China based network of global experts to capture the capability, passion and commitment for developing the bamboo sector. Prosperity Initiative's formal capability incorporates global leading expertise and enables concrete follow up, offering tailored services to those interested in investing in new transformational technologies or implementing new policies and development programmes.

Through the promotion of this formal services offering, Prosperity Initiative is building a healthy and growing pipeline of investment and policy development project interests both within the Mekong countries and beyond.

Emerging from this pipeline:

 Prosperity Initiative's Financing Model

In its initial stages, Prosperity Initiative has been financed almost exclusively by donor grants. The next phase for Prosperity Initiative will be to shift to a joint financing model in the provision of services to businesses and governments.

Ongoing grant financing is required:

Prosperity Initiatve expects to have a portion of its costs financed by commercial clients:

In the next several years of bamboo sector services delivery, Prosperity Initiative will look to both donors and commercial clients to jointly finance ongoing non-profit work. We will deliver services to businesses and governments in a commercial manner, but arrange the financing of these on a case by case basis. To achieve this, Prosperity Initiative is building a pipeline of donor and commercial interests keen to participate in the sector.

Prosperity Initiative will also begin to enage in direct commercial activity in selected cases to ensure catalytic businesses are established to provide concrete demonstration to potential investors. This will reduce the lead times for, and the cost to support the adoption of the most relevant business models. 

Beyond Bamboo

PI Analytics is Prosperity Initiative's market analysis and impact assessment team which continuously examines markets and their potential for market based poverty reduction through donor projects and consultancy work. This work enables us to identify other potential sectors for future Prosperity Initiative activities.

Prosperity Initiative's sector pipeline includes tourism and coconut sectors which both demonstrate opportunities for new value-adding market share for poor communities. At this early stage of our work, these sectors also demonstrate a need for services and capabilities to be developed along similar lines to that of our bamboo services. We will be looking to develop small scale pilot projects, both in terms of services to governments and firms, and also by engaging in joint business activities. We will subsequently evaluate these pilot activities and decide whether to gradually develop tourism and coconuts as longer term sector programmes.

*Prosperity Initiative Analysis 2009 

**Prosperity Initiative Analysis 2010