Small enterprises at the service of the poor

The changing role of the business community in addressing the widening gap between rich and poor is an area that has received increasing attention within the fields of development studies and beyond. New forms of hybrid enterprise such as fair trade organisations, social enterprises and NGO‐business partnerships have demonstrated the potential of creating synergies between traditional enterprise motivations and more social concerns, and also their pitfalls. This paper examines a global network of one group of socially oriented enterprises that emerged in the 1990s: the Economy of Sharing. It examines whether this global network involving the business community and civil society organisations could offer a new approach to rebalancing the relationship between wealth creation and distribution in a globalised world.