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Talking to Tomorrow - The Road Less Travelled

September 28, 2006
Talking to Tomorrow - The Road Less Travelled. Check it out:
(AllAfrica.com English Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Harare, Sep 27, 2006 (Financial Gazette/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --II IS my sincerest hope that a direct consequence of Environment Africa's advertised competition for corporate social responsibility programmes will be a fresh focus on what exactly CSR is.



Companies here tend to use CSR and its cousin CSI interchangeably. Being two sides of the same coin this is to be expected. Definitions are used quite loosely, even in the practice itself. Thus, CSR has come to mean almost the same thing as donations and sponsorships. When a large corporation donates a few books to a rural school, it calls that CSR. When employees in a financial institution visit a remote village and donate blankets to child-headed families, the elderly or infirm, they call that CSR.

The examples are many and we see and hear about them every week. If the companies are unable to persuade media that there is something newsworthy about the new blankets they donated to an old people's home in Dotito, they are sure to take out a supplement in the print media, which can be anything from one page to four pages long.

There is nothing wrong with that. I just feel that companies should do more if they want to suggest to us that they care about the communities in the areas in which they operate. Small donations and one-off sponsorships are good and must continue. In fact, all responsible citizens should do something to assist the less fortunate. Such assistance, though, tends to be ad hoc in nature, where real CSR is more sustainable and long-term.

Those with the means (and the latest half-year results can give a quick indicator of the identity of some of them) can and must make more meaningful and lasting contributions than token gestures. Everyone appreciates the harsh economic operating environment in Zimbabwe today and its negative effects on business performance across all sectors.

The trouble with this is that it has become an expedient excuse for those companies who do not feel compelled to plough back into their communities. In a few years' time tomorrow, we shall be lamenting this passivity. And, at the rate things are going in a Zimbabwe where "tsika nditsikewo" and "chaita mumwe chiitewo" are becoming cultural, everyone has become everyone else's copycat. Few are willing or even brave enough to beat a new path, travel the road not used by many. We have stopped being creative: if one financial institution holds a successful corporate golf day, you can be assured that the country will quickly turn into a golfer's paradise. The week before last, in fact, there were four corporate golf days advertised for one day in Harare alone! Maybe we should look at that subject on its own some day, particularly when you consider how many executives are out of their offices on Wednesday or Friday afternoons.

For now, however, let us revisit the reasons why CSI and CSR make good business sense.

We all know that companies are set up in business to earn profits for owners or shareholders. To my knowledge, no private commercial enterprise was ever set up for the sole purpose of helping the poor. All the private commercial entities I know have fancy mission statements and vision statements that envisage themselves as the best in their industry. If we follow this argument, then, you do not set up a business to do corporate social investment.

Instead, CSI is incorporated as a core value of the business among the usual ones about ethics, good governance, integrity and so forth. To understand why companies invest or ought to invest in the communities in which they operate, we must first appreciate the subtle distinctions in CSR and CSI.

In a discussion paper on CSR and Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue published by the World Bank in 2003, Piotr Mazurkiewicz and Lucia Grenna observe that: "In the emerging global economy, where the Internet, the news media and the information revolution shine light on business practices around the world, companies are more and more frequently judged on the basis of their environmental stewardship. Partners in business and consumers want to know what is inside a company. They want to do business with companies they can trust and believe in. This transparency of business practices means that for many companies, corporate social responsibility is no longer a luxury, but a requirement."

Mazurkiewicz and Grenna say that while there are different perspectives of CSR in an organisation, common ones may cover the role of a business in relation to the state, locally and nationally, as well as to other state institutions or standards; or business performance as a responsible member of the society in which it operates and the global community.

Although the authors' focus tends to put the spotlight on CSR with particular reference to "green" issues, they pick out a number of definitions, one of which is from Business for Social Responsibility and which defines CSR as: "...operating a business in a manner that meets or exceeds the ethical, legal, commercial and public expectations that society has of business. CSR is seen by leadership companies as more than a collection of discrete practices or occasional gestures (my emphasis), or initiatives motivated by marketing, public relations or other business benefits. Rather, it is viewed as a comprehensive set of policies, practices and programmes that are integrated throughout business operations and decision-making processes that are supported and rewarded by top management . . ."

According to the South African public relations gurus Chris Skinner and Llew von Essen, the field of CSI has evolved out of the broader CSR and is defined as the funding of, and involvement in, socioeconomic upliftment. CSR itself encompasses the responsibility of a company to ensure that it, among other things, manages itself responsibly and to the advantage of its employees and society; contributes to the sustainable development of the natural environment and contributes towards the development and upliftment of the disadvantaged.

Skinner and von Essen maintain that communication campaigns supporting social investment programmes must be sensitive and well planned.

"The aim of communicating community involvement is not to brag but to inform and create awareness."

This supports my assertion in a previous instalment on the same subject that it does not make sense for an organisation to spend huge amounts of money on publicity for a small ad hoc donation, where the publicity becomes several times more expensive than the actual donation. There are many people in society who find this insulting, seeing it as an exercise in chest beating self-indulgence. It is not necessary: the object of communication is to create awareness of the organisation's social responsibility programmes and to achieve the support from the community so essential for the success of such programmes.

Mazurkiewicz and Grenna: "Good communication is essential to building trust, and trust is the intangible factor that makes collaboration cohesive. Trust also presupposes a genuine appreciation by the partners for each other's activities. Communication should be honest, forthright, frequent and meaningful . . ."

Although they are addressing the issue of communication between collaborating partners in a CSR initiative, the comment is pertinent as regards general and broader communication, which is just as important. The leading companies of the world communicate extensively regarding their involvement in communities, with the result that general perceptions of their operations are favourable. They know that doing so makes good business sense in an environment where business performance is under growing media and societal scrutiny.

Environment Africa's CSR awards must force us to interrogate companies' behaviour further and encourage corporate Zimbabwe to venture off the beaten track.

n Ray Mawerera is a Harare-based public relations consultant and the current President of the Zimbabwe Institute of Public Relations

Copyright 2006 Financial Gazette. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).


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