It is by developing products that help prevent humanitarian disasters that companies can make the most significant impact


I have just returned from ten days in Nairobi, where the grass is green, the supermarket shelves are groaning – although there is a bizarre shortage of sugar – and the restaurants are full of people who think nothing of sending their meals back half eaten.


Yet just a few hours away is the most serious famine to hit the region for 30 years, and the world’s largest refugee camp – Dadaab. Already hosting over 250,000 refugees before the famine, as a result of the upheavals caused by civil war in Somalia, this camp, or rather this series of three camps, is now home to 400,000 people and more than 1,500 people a day are joining them.


This means that it is a city that is growing by 10% per month – a massive organisational challenge in its own right.


Advance Aid is partnering with World Vision, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and logistics company Agility to source locally manufactured non-food items – plastic sheeting for shelter, jerrycans, blankets, mosquito nets, kitchen sets and hygiene kits – and supply them to the needy in these camps.


We are also trying to build up pre-positioned supplies of these goods so that the response to future disasters is available more rapidly.


What companies can do


So what should concerned companies do when a disaster of this scale strikes somewhere on the planet – especially one that is both as widespread as the east African famine and also as grievously underfunded?


There are two obvious routes open. The first of these is matched giving and gifts-in-kind. The second is one that is less obvious but potentially much more long-lasting (and that I will come to later).


Matched giving is easy to set up and should generate internal interest, staff and local community goodwill and strong PR – all important parts of a decent corporate responsibility programme. Our partner Agility is doing this in Nairobi, agreeing to match with its own cash any money raised for the Kenyan victims of the famine by employees.


One of the problems with this approach to helping famine victims is that the east African famine is not getting the level of news coverage in the rich countries of the north that gets individuals there up off their sofas and running marathons, or organising cake sales.


The civil war in Libya – which is, of course, creating a humanitarian disaster of its own – has driven the famine off the front pages and TV screens of Europe and North America.


Helpful gifts


Gifts-in-kind are also a way of assisting. If, for example, Advance Aid receives donated goods that it would otherwise have to buy, then donor money will go further.


But there is an inherent tension between what we want to provide to refugees, based on what we and our partners know that they need, and what companies want to give. Inevitably the two don’t always match.


And gifts-in-kind have a dark side too. I was looking for sources of gifts-in-kind only last week and found my way to a corporate website offering free condoms to NGOs. Wonderful, I thought, as we include 24 condoms in each emergency kit and would need 120,000 condoms for the latest order that we are fulfilling.


But it turns out that the expiry date of these “free” condoms was two years ago, and any NGO that is interested also has to ship them from the US to wherever it is that they are needed.


The attractions for the company in this case are clear – shifting unwanted and probably unsaleable stock, for which it will probably get a tax credit, and the potential for good PR from being seen to “give away” goods.


Not a ‘win-win’


With the NGOs paying for transportation, the whole exercise costs the company nothing, it gets a tax break and also frees up space in the warehouse. Apparently a win-win that generates a warm feeling and also makes money.


But it stinks. Either expiry dates mean something or they don’t. Either these condoms are fit for use or they are not. There really should not be one rule for the rich and another for the poor. And governments, especially the US, condone this approach by offering tax write-offs for gifts of this kind.


There is a less obvious route. It is harder work, but is vastly more rewarding on a moral as well as (ultimately) a financial level.


This involves setting up companies in developing countries that focus on making cheap, good value, products for the poor focused on what they actually need. It is “bottom of the pyramid” stuff, but driven by a commercial imperative.


If you are reading this in the corporate HQ of a Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 company, there’s realistically not a whole lot that you can do about this east African famine. But there is a whole lot that you can do to ensure that a famine like this never occurs again.


Help for future customers


It’s also not really a disaster-response solution, but something that is longer term and more in the development box than the humanitarian relief one. But by providing, for example, cheap and nutritious food products that offer high value for poor people and help them to survive and even prosper, companies can make future famines less likely.


Unsurprisingly, the people behind this approach to bringing manufacturing excellence to the production of goods for the poor are Grameen Bank. Grameen has partnered with giant corporations – Adidas, Danone, BASF – to produce products locally that poor people can afford, want to buy, and do them good.


Muhammad Yunus is founder of Grameen – though he has in fact recently fallen out with some colleagues at the bank and the Bangladesh government. When Yunus wanted to do something about malnutrition in Bangladesh, he got in touch with Danone and they set up Grameen Danone Foods to make a yoghurt that is fortified with micronutrients and very cheap.


If a malnourished child has two cups of this a week and keeps this up for eight or nine months they will, Yunus says, be a fully healthy child at the end of that time.


When he wanted to do something about malaria, he went to BASF, and they created BASF Grameen to make impregnated nets. This social business also makes multi-micronutrient sachets that it sells to poor families. To provide clean water he went to Veolia and Grameen Veolia Water was established, again catering to the needs of the poor.


If people in east Africa had access to clean, cheap water, and food products especially designed to deal with malnutrition at a price that people there could afford, the chances of another famine would surely be reduced significantly.


Corporate responsibility programmes should not just be a knee-jerk reaction to a disaster, or a short-term campaign to improve a company’s image. They should be built into the DNA of the organisation as an entity that serves the needs of a wide range of consumers.


So, matched giving is undoubtedly a good thing, and gifts-in-kind can be a good thing (but often aren’t).


But the wise head, and the truly concerned CR professional – concerned for his/her company as well as for the people of the world – needs to take a longer term view of the company’s position in relation to the consumers of the world and what it can truly do to help.


Howard Sharman
is a senior consultant with Advance Aid.

 

  



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