Tag Archives: for-profit sector involvement in aid

Ménage à trois

8 Nov

Here’s how aid works:

1) Someone pays for it. We call this person or entity a “donor.”

2) Someone else implements it. We call this person or entity an “aid provider” – usually, but not necessarily and NGO.

3) And someone else receives what the first one pays for and the second one implements. We call this person the “beneficiary”, usually for lack of a better term.

Some of us go on about the different kinds of donors, the extent to which their level of understanding and their motivations matter, what their rights are or should be in the grand scheme of things, or the extent to which they should be allowed to meddle in the workings of aid providers.

Some of us go on stridently about the different kinds of aid providers: Who should or shouldn’t be allowed to be one, what it takes to be a good one, the extent to which aid providers are or aren’t unduly influenced by the motivations of their donors, or the extent to which they should be required to share certain kinds of information.

Some of us go on passionately about the beneficiaries. What their rights are, what they can reasonably expect from donors and aid providers, what their capacities are, and the extent to which they have a role to play in the overall picture of aid.

These are vigorous, often vehement debates. And rightly so, as they all touch on important issues.

But just so that we’re all clear, none – not one – of these debates challenges the basic aid formula. None of these debates address in any substantial way the global reality of aid: that it is a giant ménage à trois between donors, aid providers and beneficiaries, each of whom approaches relationship with diverse needs and expectations, and where the aid providers’ role is primarily brokering the relationship between donors and beneficiaries.

And so you’ll forgive me, gentle reader, when I come off as more than just a tiny bit jaded with the rhetoric coming out of, say, the Cannes G20 summit. Or statements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about their “innovative financing.” Or when I juxtapose what comes up when I click “draft agenda” for this year’s HLF-4 in Busan against the stated purpose of the forum “…review global progress in improving the impact and value for money of development aid and make new commitments to further ensure that aid helps reduce poverty…”

I get jaded because none of these forums or discussions addresses the basic nature of the aid formula. The ménage à trois. What the Gates Foundation calls “innovative financing”, isn’t. It’s simply the latest attempt to modify the parameters of how traditional donors work and maybe change up the kinds of strings attached to donor funding. It’s also the basis for a lot of HRI-style workshops and meetings and junkets. If you want truly innovative financing for foreign aid, find a way to pay for it that doesn’t involve donors. Simple as that.

Or bringing together 2,000 representatives from around the world to review the Paris and Accra declarations for the purpose of making development aid more effective.  Am I the only one who reads “High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness” as an oxymoron on multiple levels? For one, 2,000… coming together… to make progress on aid effectiveness… wait.. what? For another, the key to aid effectiveness is not something about the legal frameworks of a bunch of developed countries. This is focus on but one of the members of the torrid little aid ménage à trois. You want aid effectiveness on some kind of global scale, you have to deal with all three.

If you want to truly change the way aid works, you need to find a way to change the ménage à trois formula. PPP and CSR are just new kinds of donors. Mixing bilateral aid with traditional development aid, government to government capacity-building, and all of that simply adds complexity around who is a donor, who is a provider, and who is a beneficiary at the ground level. Technological and programmatic innovations (awesome as they might be) simply re-tool the ways in which aid providers continue business as usual. Humanitarian accountability and basic good process are “musts” (and I sincerely believe that they make aid better). But let’s not delude ourselves into believing that they confer any real change in status to the benefiaries of aid.

You want to be “game changing”? Find a way to change up the ménage à trois. Otherwise, you’re simply using new words to describe the same ol’.

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Draw the line

23 Sep

This my contribution to the first Aid Blog Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility.

One thing the corporate world absolutely has going for it is that at the end of the day, everyone in that world knows where their bottom line is.

The bottom line is profit.

Everything else is ultimately subservient to profit. Every pet project. Every initiative. Every innovation. They all fit into a larger profit calculation, and so when those pet projects or those innovative initiatives don’t bear fruit in the form of profit, they get cut. And if those running the show don’t have the good sense to cut those projects which cost the company money, as opposed to generating more of it, raw Darwinism eventually takes over. The bottom line is profit. Cross it and you’re out of business.

Sure, there is messed-up-ness in the corporate world, too. It’s not all a well-oiled profit-making machine. There’s boondoggle and graft and messed up priorities just like in any other sector. But I can guarantee you that whether we’re talking about one individual making a profit while running her or his company into the ground, or a sector within the corporate world raking in the cash while running the economy of an entire nation into the ground, the notion of profit reigns supreme. In the corporate world, regardless of whatever else might be in the mix – motivations, beliefs, distractions, investment, innovations, R&D, vision – the comes a point at which the bills have to be paid and the shareholders have to be paid out. The bottom line is profit.

And this all applies to Corporate Social Responsibility, too. CSR exists precisely because it’s profitable. It is important to be clear on this point: the bottom-line enhancing qualities of CSR are not an afterthought or serendipity or by-products. On the contrary, they’re the entire point. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Philip Morris funding cancer research, Proctor & Gamble making PUR water purification sachets available, TOMS Shoes giving away shoes and glasses and calling it “aid”, or a world of shade and color and nuance and variation among all of those, CSR is about that bottom line, profit. I think we can all very safely assume that Corporate Social Responsibility investments would stop existing tomorrow if they weren’t profitable.

I’m not saying this is either good or bad. It just is.

What it means for humanitarians, though, is that we come to the CSR conversation with a very distinct disadvantage: we don’t have a bottom line. At least not one that is as clear and tangible as profit, and certainly not one that is universally acknowledged in the humanitarian world. We have some generalized notions about humanitarian ethics in the broader context, and some vague, squishy ideas about what’s good and bad, right and wrong when it comes to “partnering” with corporations. But we don’t have a humanitarian equivalent to “profit” in the corporate world. We don’t have a universal, grounding principle against which every initiative, opportunity, or “potential for collaboration with the corporate sector” can be held up against to show us clearly, “yes, this is legitimate humanitarian relief or development, this is acceptable”, or, “no, we need to leave this one on the table.”

The humanitarian world lacks a clear line beyond which negotiations with a donor, any donor, corporate or other, are terminated categorically on the basis of principle. This is a line that we desperately need to draw, and draw soon. We need to figure out what we’ll do and what we won’t. And not in the 35,000 ft. “We shall respect culture and custom” sense, but in the sea-level, “to what extent can we ethically enable market penetration of [PRODUCT X by CORPORATION A] in communities where we work in the name of ‘relief’ or ‘development’” sense.  Corporate Social Responsibility is not going away, and we have a responsibility to inject values and parameters other than profit into the calculus.

We have to draw the line.

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The 1st Aid Blog Forum: Corporate Social Responsibility

19 Sep

Welcome to the first convocation of the Aid Blog Forum

Our first topic for internet-wide conversation: Corporate Social Responsibility.

A tiny bit of background on Corporate Social Responsibility:

Wikipedia on CSR

Can companies save the world? Should they even try? (Forbes)

CSRWire (a site the provided CSR-related news releases)

CSR Hub (a site that rates companies based on their CSR)

Corporate Social Responsibility is the new sexy thing in the philanthropy and humanitarian fundraising worlds. “Doing well while doing good” is the buzz phrase. But I’ll admit that I come to the CSR conversation with a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. I’ve seen it be really lame a lot of the time, and I’ve seen it go really bad a few times. But the ship has also very obviously sailed. CSR is here to stay for better and/or for worse. As humanitarians we have to deal with CSR.

Here’s where you come in. What do you think?

What do you have in the way of practical, nuanced discussion about what it takes to make CSR actually work? And I mean “actually work” in the “it makes life better for the poor somehow on their terms” sense, and not really so much in the “woo-hoo! we’ve found a way to do good without compromising our own doing well” sense. Where possible, I’d love to see us all writing towards things that are actionable. A few suggestions to get the juices flowing:

  • What should we start doing that hasn’t been done before?
  • What existing practices or ways of thinking about CSR should be stopped or change? Be specific.
  • How should we think about CSR?
  • What are some “always do”, “never ever ever ever do”, and “decide on a case-by-case basis” guidelines that should be followed by NGOs? By corporate CSR departments?
  • What principles should guide NGO marketing and corporate relations departments as they engage with counterparts in the corporate CSR world to consider partnerships and opportunities for programs in the field?
  • High-level analyses: How does the aggressive growth of corporate CSR change the landscape for practitioners and recipients of humanitarian aid and development? What are the long-term ramifications of CSR, whether positive or negative?

But hey - these are suggestions only. Write whatever you feel moved or inspired to write on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility.

* * * * *

Here’s how The Forum works:

1) At some point over the next five days you write and post on your own blog your views on the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility in the context of international humanitarian aid and development.

2) Once your post is live, come back here and click the goofy blue lizard-looking logo at the bottom of this post. Click the “add your link” button near the bottom of the page you get redirected to, paste the URL of your post into the space provided, and follow the prompts.

3) To see all posts by everyone who’s participated in the forum, just click the goofy blue lizard-looking logo at the bottom of this post: you’ll see them all named and linked in the re-directed window (future editions of The Forum will not require re-direct).

4) Tweet, like, link, post on Facebook…

How easy was that?!

The rules of engagement for participating in the Aid Blog Forum can be found here.

You’ll be able to add links to this forum through 26 September, 2011.

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