Paris adopts Yunus''s three zeroes as central theme for Olympic 2024
Yunus Centre Press release ( 13 November 2016):
The Candidate City Paris has decided to give central role to Nobel Laureate Professor Yunus's three zeroes vision zero poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions - in the City's bid for the 2024 Summer
Olympic games.
On 8 November 2016, Nobel Laureate Professor Yunus and Ms Ann Hidalgo Mayor of Paris together with the President of Candidate City for the Olympics signed a three way agreement for integrating social business as a central pillar of the city’s candidacy for the 2024 Olympic.
The agreement was formalized in a signing ceremony at a press conference at the Mayor's office in the historic building of Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) convened by Mayor Anne Hidalgo who was a signatory to the agreement along with Professor Yunus and Etienne Thobois the President of the Committee for Promoting the City of Paris as a candidate for holding the Olympic in 2024. While addressing the press conference the Mayor announced that she had invited Professor Yunus to hold the Global Social Business in Paris next year as a part of the initiative to spread social business programmes throughout Paris. This summit will be held on November 6-7, 2017. She will invite the Mayors of forty leading cities of the world to attend the summit. She is the Chairperson of the C40, which is the association of these forty cities. She explained that her initiative will be part of a long term program launched by her to make Paris the global hub for social business. Her initiative formally began with her launching last month, in the presence of Professor Yunus, Les Canaux, a magnificent building in Paris. This building was named as the Social Business House and dedicated to promoting and creating social business.
During this visit to Paris Professor Yunus also inaugurated the Social Business Academia Conference 2016 which was hosted by HEC Paris and Yunus Centre on November 9 -10 at the famous business school in Jouy en Josas outside Paris.
This annual conference attracted 125 academics from 15 countries. There were 66 paper submissions this year, of which 44 were accepted for presentation. These included papers related to social business and education, technology, healthcare, disaster management, entrepreneurship, marketing and other issues. There were also presentations at the conference by 11 of the 28 Yunus Social Business Centres established in universities around the world which are doing research, developing courses, undertaking projects on social business with a view to mainstreaming social business within university curricula and giving students the option to become involved in social business once they graduate.
During the evening of the first day, HEC Paris, the leading business school in France, launched a social business movement led by the university and participatd by the leading French companies at a large event attended by over 1,000 in the audience. Leadership of the movement addreseed the audience explaining their plans. They introduced the top executives of corporations which had already joined the movement. This list includes Danone, Veolia, Schneider Electric, Renault, Sodexo, Totale among other leading French companies. Professor Yunus gave the keynote speech at the event where he challenged young people to become entrepreneurs instead of job seekers, and also launch social business as a way to halt the process of wealth concentration which threatens peace and stability around the world. CEO of Danone Emmanuel Faber also addressed the audience.
Professor Yunus also attended events in Paris organized by Danone Communities, a special fund created by Danone to invest in social businesses focused on malnutrition and access to clean water in several countries in Africa and Asia. He also met with a group of entrepreneurs from North Africa and the Middle East who are in Paris for a special program to build capacity of entrepreneurs in the troubled regions of the world.
Photo Caption 1: Nobel Laureate Professor Yunus, Mayor of Paris Ms Anne Hidalgo and Etienne Thobois, President of Candidate Olympic City Paris signed an agreement in Paris town hall on 8 November to put social business and three zero as a central pillar of the city’s candidacy for the 2024 Olympic games.
Photo Caption 2: Participants of Social Business Academia Conference(SBAC) 2016 which was hosted by HEC Paris and Yunus Centre on November 9 -10 at the famous business school HEC are seen with Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.
Source: Yunus Centre
Updated Date: 18th January, 2017