Muhtar Kent on women's entrepreneurship
From Kent Program Summer Training Panel 2: The Golden Triangle: Transforming Conflict through Cooperation · · Columbia SIPA
“I had a very deep belief that these issues can only be solved with the inherent collaboration of government, business, and civil society coming together to provide solutions. One was setting a goal to create five million women entrepreneurs around the world. We went to each country, identified an NGO partner, we went to the IFC and said let's do two agreements, 100 million dollars each of microcredit, we put together with the NGOs in each country a training program, and the NGOs identified the woman leader, woman entrepreneurial candidates. We trained the woman entrepreneurial candidates in distribution, logistics, retailing, basic accounting. They got when they graduated, we linked them up to microcredit and off they went.”
On , Muhtar Kent, Former Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at Coca-Cola Company (The), spoke about women's entrepreneurship during Kent Program Summer Training Panel 2: The Golden Triangle: Transforming Conflict through Cooperation on Columbia SIPA.
About Muhtar Kent
At Coca-Cola's 2019 annual shareholders meeting, outgoing Chairman Muhtar Kent responded to activist Ray Rogers' allegations of human rights abuses at Coca-Cola facilities in Latin America and elsewhere by stating that "nothing could be further from the truth of those allegations" and that "there's just no ground to any of those allegations." Kent said the company sees "eye to eye with all our bottlers related to issues of adhering to the highest standards of human rights," but noted that bottlers are "independent companies run by independent leadership teams" and that "not everything can be dictated to bottlers." He said the company would continue to work with activists to "influence" and "bring matters to a better place." In a 2018 CNBC interview, Kent described the global business environment as characterized by "volatility, volatility, volatility, and more unknowns," adding that "running a global business is just getting tougher and harder" due to socio-political dynamics. He said he was a "realistic optimist" that the US-China trade dispute would be resolved "for the benefit of both countries and the world." Kent also said that while Coca-Cola is "the quintessential American brand," the company is "so local" in China, noting that its ownership includes Chinese state-owned and Chinese enterprise partners.