PARIS (AFP) – From the start of its bid to host the 2024 Olympics, Paris has sought advice from a prominent adviser, Nobel Peace Prize winner and social business guru Mohammed Yunus.
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Yunus pioneered microcredit in his native Bangladesh starting in the 1970s, providing small loans to traders to help them start their own businesses and lifting millions out of poverty.
His role in Paris as an adviser and ambassador for socially responsible business is different from his usual job, and all the more surprising given the Olympics' reputation for hosting mega-projects and corporate sponsors.
The 84-year-old admits he's not even a sports fan, but when he received an invitation to dinner from Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, and her team were running to host the Olympics in 2016, he agreed to attend.
“I told them the simplest thing they can do before making any decision about allocating funds is to ask themselves, 'Does this item have a social purpose?'” Yunus said.
“If this is not the case, not a single penny should be allocated,” he added.
He says he quickly saw an opportunity to use the power of the Olympics to spread a message about the importance of embracing new ways of doing business that focus on solving human problems rather than making profits.
“Whenever Paris does something, it immediately gets global attention,” he said. “It broadens people's awareness of Paris, their respect for Paris, their history and that Paris is known for creativity.”
– Another village –
Yunus said his ideas have been well received by the mayor's office and the organizing committee, and his vision for the city's 33rd Summer Olympics is an event with a lower budget and environmental impact than previous Games.
Besides the Athletes Village, only two new sports venues have been built.
Yunus had visited the village built for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and was well aware of its pitfalls: a cluster of high-rise buildings on the outskirts of the city with poor public transport links.
“I saw all these high-rise buildings going up and I thought, 'This isn't the right way to do things,'” he said.
In contrast, Paris 2024 Villages is a collection of around 40 low-rise residential blocks built on brownfield sites in one of the poorest areas of northern Paris, whose redevelopment plans also include the construction of new metro lines, schools and parks.
About a third of the 2,800 apartments will be converted into social housing once the Olympics and Paralympics finish in September.
Yunus also called on organisers to consider adding “priority to social enterprises” to tenders for services such as catering.
“All the big companies that are used to winning these tenders are reading it, talking to each other and asking themselves, 'What is a social business? Are we a social business? Will we be prioritized?'” he said.
“And smart CEOs will say, 'Okay, we're not a social business, so why don't we partner with a social business?' That way we can at least get them on board with this.”
– Corporate Control –
Ultimately, the catering contract to provide 40,000 meals a day was awarded to Sodexo, a publicly listed French multinational with annual sales of more than 12 billion euros ($13 billion).
Elsewhere, the usual line-up of big-name global sponsors will use the Olympics for promotional purposes, including Japanese carmaker Toyota, global steelmaker ArcelorMittal and French luxury goods empire LVMH.
Most of the construction work was carried out by France's largest construction companies, Bouygues Construction, Effage and Vinci.
But on the fringes, there is a desire to use the Olympics to nurture small, socially minded businesses, even if they only benefit from a tiny fraction of the roughly 9 billion euro budget.
Paris-based plastic recycling company Le Pavé was awarded the contract to provide 11,000 seats for the new Olympic venues, and was one of around 500 “social enterprises” that won the bidding process.
Other projects include a business that turns construction waste into topsoil to be used in the Olympic Village, and laundry services there will be provided by a consortium of nine local small-scale entrepreneurs.
Olympic construction sites also required contractors to hire at least 10% of their workforce from the long-term unemployed.
Yunus doesn't seek credit for any of these efforts, but he believes that by lending his ideas and reputation to the Olympics, he is helping to inspire change.
He has joined Milan-Cortina, Italy, the host city for the 2026 Winter Olympics, as an adviser.
“They're whispering in my ear: 'We want to do better than Paris,'” he said.
© 2024 AFP
