The 2015 MNEmerge project workshop has just taken place and it has been hosted by TMCD, University of Oxford. As the project has just come through to half of its length, Oxford was honoured to host the workshop in coincidence with such landmark.

The MNEmerge is an EU-funded project that explores the role of Multinational Enterprises in developing countries. The project spans three continents, focusing on Brazil, India, and Ghana. In Brazil, the objective is to study how rural communities could be electrified in a cost-effective manner. The research in Ghana focuses on assessing the impacts of the operations of MNEs, by comparing Chinese to European companies and the different channels for diffusion of managerial knowledge. In India, the aim is to study how sanitation and hygiene could be enhanced in rural communities in order to improve people’s health and capacity for work. The project is realised with the coordination of 9 research institutions and universities, and we are pleased to host their representatives here today.

The ultimate goal of this project is to offer a novel perspective on the fight to global poverty. The MNEmerge project essentially asks the question of whether MNEs can represent an alternative to aid, as a way to empower communities to lift themselves out of poverty. Such endeavour is mirrored against the new United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals agenda, to which we hope to make a contribution.

More than 20 participants from all the partnering institutions have attended the three days of workshop, which has been a great opportunity to exchange information on current progress, plan ahead towards the next landmarks, and contribute to the diffusion and dissemination of the findings.

Having come half-way through the three year length of the project, all the teams based at different institutions around the world had preliminary results to discuss. More work, however, needs to be done to finalise data collection and analysis. A new regional workshop has already been planned to take place in November in Brazil, while both Ghana and India will host regional workshops later in 2016.