Does social business link with the sustainable livelihoods of rural households?: Lessons from Bangladesh

The multidimensional approach in poverty research is dominating over the monetary based poverty approaches worldwide. The failure in millennium development goal in terms of reducing absolute poverty by its half lead United Nation Development Program to adopt Sustainable Development Goal. Social business is a new form of business concept put into practice firstly in Bangladesh to trigger poverty in such a multidimensional approach. Similarly, Sustainable livelihood, is a popular model of intervening poverty to the development agencies due to its design of participating people in the project policies, supports the multidimensionality too. The purpose of this study is to discuss about the conceptual explanation of social business and sustainable livelihood. Besides, this paper also portrays the conceptual linkages of social business with the sustainable livelihood framework. The present study is of qualitative in nature where extensive literature review has been conducted adopting an intensive desk research method using secondary data sources like published articles, working papers, brochures and companies official websites via internet. The study found that social business, in general, possess the feature of reducing vulnerability of people directly providing with an array of products and indirectly, with its innovative policy of making involve deprived people in the entire value chain as active participants. In addition, its integrative business approach helps in searching people’s deficiencies like knowledge, skills, affordability and taking remedial measures in the form of training, financial support, frequent surveillance and accumulation of resources. The study concluded that social business, driven by problems and pro-poor approach, could be a complementary model for superseding poverty via sustainable livelihood approach. As implication of the study, it will help policy makers to adopt or adjust their policy regarding bringing sustainability of people’s life with a new tools other than the existing state-run or philanthropy based programs. Besides, it will also broaden the interest of researchers for further empirical tests relevant to this sort of business and effectiveness of it in alleviating poverty and ensuring sustainability.