I’ve just spent two days in intensive meetings meant to take to the next level my employer’s in-house conversation about tapping into corporate support for relief and development work.
My prior grumbling clearly has not worked. And I find myself being worn down…
For-profit sector interest involvement in aid work is fully a reality of the world we live in now. We (and I say this for my own benefit as much as for the benefit of anyone else) need to acknowledge and deal with this reality.
Thinking out loud about what this means…
Just like bilateral, governmental and large institutional donors, corporate donors represent a very wide range of motivations and objectives, and also technical rigor. We must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that, regardless of any community benefit language that they may use, benevolent programming that they might support, or even as good as they might actually be, the for-profit sector and for-profit companies exist precisely for the purpose of making profit. Which means that they will come to the humanitarian aid conversation with a set of assumptions, priorities, goals and tolerances that do not necessarily overlap with ours.
I do not write this out of cynicism or distrust (although there’s justification for both), but simply as a statement of fact. We’re quite used to talking about this divergence of interests between NGOs and donors when it comes to bilateral government donors or funding from institutions like the World Bank. But it seems we’ve been initially somewhat naïve on that point when it comes to corporate donors. Maybe we’ve allowed ourselves to believe, wrongly, that because the proposal formats, approval processes and reporting requirements for corporate funds seem almost endearingly simple in comparison to government grants, that corporate grant-making is somehow less calculated towards end goals. Donors fund aid work based on what they believe will advance their own interests. Period.
As well, after several decades now of NGO engagement and push-back and “donor advocacy” towards our more traditional governmental and institutional donors, we seem to have achieved a level of comfort with those relationships. We know very well where the areas of divergence and overlap are, and we know from experience where we can push-back and how. We’ve kind of made peace with the fact that we have to agree to disagree with those donors on some points. But now we’re having to start the process of getting to this point from the beginning with our corporate donors. It feels redundant, like going back to square one, and that’s frustrating.
We need to view and talk about and interact with the for-profit sector fully as an “aid actor” – and I mean “aid actor” in the same sense that we talk about ourselves, the UN, big bilateral donors like USAID or the EC, and relevant host government entities. Whether they participate in coordination meetings or not, whether they engage in the kind of analytical, strategic or competitive bidding processes that other aid actors do, the for-profits are increasingly a central part of the big picture, the “aid environment.” Corporations are fully part of the aid environment (they have been for some time, actually – what’s changed recently is that they themselves articulate that they are), and we need to engage them directly on those terms. We do everyone, including ourselves and our beneficiaries less than full service if we segregate out the for-profits in our overall thinking.
NGOs and perhaps particularly INGOs need to remain clear, internally and externally, about their/our role in the aid conversation. I see the role of NGOs becoming specifically more about advocacy, representation, championing the cause of the poor. Both the traditional donors and aid-involved corporations now increasingly employ aid professionals and maintain social responsibility units with immense technical capability. Our resource constraints will eventually mean that we cannot keep up with them on that front. Yet of all of the aid actors and non-aid actors in the aid conversation, NGOs are the only ones whose primary interest is (or should be) benefit to the poor on their own terms. For donors, whether governments, foundations, corporations, or individuals, helping the poor is a means to another end: advancing foreign policy, gaining market share, a tax write-off or accumulating treasure in Heaven. For NGOs, helping the poor is itself the end. We should be careful to not understate our importance on this point.
Maybe we need to mean business about our core business. Maybe we need to get back to our roots of essentially telling donors what to care about and how to spend their money. We did it USAID and DFID and the EC and AusAID and the UN (and many others). Now we need to do it with the corporate sector.
Great post.
In my own experience I’ve found colleagues having tendency either to think that the corporate sector is evil and against the very essence of development to them being the saviours and the wave of the future.
I think its important to see them with a clear light. They have a potentially significant role both as donors, but also as social actors – but at the same time their social responsibility work is untimately driven by their own interests such as bottom line and brand building.
Of course this is an opportunity for “principle-led” organizations (which I think goes beyond NGOs – but also excludes some of them) to work with corporates to help influence how they act and to identify the common ground betwen their objectives and ours (and to walk away or confront them when we can’t). Another key part of this is to influence the stakeholders in corporations such as their customers, shareholders and employees to help persuade them to align their social responsiblity activities with things that are – well – socially responsible.
While I agree with many points in this post, it paints a picture of for-profit companies/organizations as being evil. This is simply not true. Yes, many are selfish and only want to make money for themselves, but many donate the profit they make in order to make a positive difference.
You also say that you’ve been able to tell the public donors how to donate their money – I’m sorry but this simply isn’t the case. Maybe you’ve been able to shape the projects themselves, but the donors only donate to countries where they have a strategic interest and they only want projects in the sectors they want (livelihoods, health, etc). Their profit isn’t money, it’s political power. And by taking their money, you’re helping to fulfill their goals, whether or not you’ve shaped/written a specific project.