Corporate social responsibility and children's rights in South Asia

CSR initiatives focusing on children in South Asia

By: Godbole G
Published by: Save the Children, 2007
Via: Eldis

This document presents examples of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives within the context of children's issues in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. According to the study, CSR initiatives for children have a positive impact and in some cases can be more effective than Government or NGO led initiatives.

Yet, children's issues often do not get sufficient consideration in the corporate agenda. Moreover, most of the CSR initiatives that do target children often follow the welfare approach. The programmes seldom involve children as social actors and partners in their own development. Also, more needs to be done to build partnerships with the government and civil society institutions to make the initatives more effective.

The document also make suggestion for Save the Children to consider while formulating a strategy for corporate sector engagement. This suggestions might be useful also for other civil society organsiations thinking about increasing corporate sector engagement. Suggestions include:

• entering into a dialogue with some of the companies having a very progressive outlook both in its management philosophy and CSR initiatives
• influencing public-private partnership for furthering child rights in the region
• companies would always like to support good projects and may ask for good project proposals that could be supported. Save the Children should proactively develop a couple of such project proposals which could be submitted on demand
• invite the corporate sector to seminars and events on relevant issues
• arrange to disseminate literature on child rights periodically to CSR practitioners and keep tab on CSR conferences to attend and do advocacy work.
  

The appendix of the document includes a number of case studies of CSR initatives engaging children. They are CSR activities by the following companies and corporate foundations: Azim Premji Foundation, Chevron, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Forbes Marshall, ICICI Bank, IKEA , Intel , NTPC, Naandi Foundation, Satyam Computers and Wipro.

(http://sca.savethechildren.se/upload/scs/SCA/Publications/Corporate%20social%20
responsibility%20and%20childrens%20rights%20in%20South%20Asia.pdf)