Running toward the fire


On the latest episode of the Devex Book Club, Notre Dame Professor Emerita Viva Ona Bartkus, the author of “Business on the Edge: How to Turn a Profit and Improve Lives in the World’s Toughest Places,” discusses how the world's most challenging markets are a place where some businesses are figuring out how to thrive.

In a conversation with Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar, Bartkus shares findings from her research, which documents 80 companies that are achieving high returns by engaging with — not avoiding — conflict zones and extreme poverty. Their success isn’t a coincidence but a strategy: crafting ventures that flourish in fragile contexts by replacing extractive business practices with collaborative models that build lasting economic foundations.

 Listen to Hard places, high returns: Rethinking crisis markets with Viva Ona Bartkus.