Water and sanitation also appeared to be common, probably because of the government's call to action in the Swachh Bharat mission. There is some ambiguity in the law about aligning business and CSR, which means that companies have a.
Social organisations have been excited about the potential of the CSR law
What do stakeholders need to realise the intent and
The government and companies must engage each other to clarify expectations
Thirty-six percent of companies in the survey reported relying on their internal teams for measuring impact, a similar proportion (33%) relied on external parties and 14% on implementation partners. Companies are eager to see how interventions in the lives of beneficiaries of the program expand.
There is a need to build and collate knowledge to guide decision-making
Some of the reasons for this trend were inherent complexity in measuring social value, lack of common understanding and definition of impact - with counting of coverage and output figures generally taken as a proxy for real impact - and the lack of standardized measurement frameworks and instruments that could guide companies and social organizations.
Impact! Impact! Impact!
Practical guidance for each step in the lifecycle of a CSR project, in particular how to assess implementation partners, how to understand risks in certain CSR programs and how to formulate an exit strategy. With the law in place, there is a growing recognition within the industry of the importance of CSR.
Capacity across stakeholders and lifecycle of CSR needs augmenting
Some philanthropists also felt there was a need to realign pay scales in the social sectors to attract and retain talent. Create multidisciplinary courses focused on the needs of the CSR ecosystem and integrate relevant modules into existing courses.
What are the emerging
Roles of existing stakeholders in the social sector are changing and new stakeholders are
We must now try to create platforms that bring together all the players in the ecosystem and allow them to pool resources and work together to create breakthrough results.
CONCLUSION
THE CHANGING FACE OF
CORPORATE SOCIAL
RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) IN INDIA
In fact, the intent of the law goes beyond facilitating financial support for the development sector, as a government-issued "Frequently Asked Questions". The report presents a broad roadmap for stakeholders to work towards realizing the intent of the CSR Act, harnessing its potential for the purpose of "nation building", and impacting the lives of underprivileged people across the country .
2 . COMPANIES AND
SECTION 135
While companies have expressed the intent to be strategic about CSR, their approaches are still
Corporate Philanthropy
Key factors that drive decision-making
Type of stakeholder engaged
Compliance - driven CSR
Strategic CSR
Creating shared value
Sustainability
Alignment with business
Flexibility to respond to national
Meets Section 135 criteria?
PHILANTHROPIC APPROACH
COMPLIANCE-DRIVEN APPROACH
STRATEGIC CSR APPROACH
India has traditionally viewed corporate participation in social development through a charitable lens, shying away from any form of benefit by doing good. For example, a large food company that produces a portfolio of fried snacks felt the need to steer clear of food as a CSR to avoid public relations backlash.
DISCONNECT BETWEEN INTENT AND PRACTICE
The main factor was the ambiguity in the law on the coordination of business and corporate social responsibility, which was expressed in the statement: "Activities carried out by a company in accordance with its normal business operations are not considered CSR expenditures," which led to Corporate India screwed up. precautions. 13. For some companies, the separation of CSR from business was a conscious decision made at board level, as they were very sensitive and aware of the risks of too closely aligning CSR with their business competencies.
INTENT
PRACTICE
Viacom18 Media Private Limited piloted “Chakachak Mumbai”, its flagship CSR program on sewers in the K/East neighborhood of Mumbai. Throughout the campaign, a mix of Hindi, English and Marathi was used, using the colloquial language and "Bambaiyya Hindi", the dialect peculiar to the city of Mumbai.
CREATING SHARED VALUE (CSV) APPROACH
The communication for Chakachak Mumbai was oriented towards both on ground as well as online audience.
NOVO NORDISK’S CHANGING DIABETES 17
SUSTAINABILITY APPROACH
Senior management and the board are the key influencers of strategy
As shown in the pie chart, 43% of companies reported that they would spend 100% of their CSR budgets in the 2015-16 financial year while 21% expected to spend between 75% and 100%, indicating that a majority significant hoped for by spending a large portion of the 2% of net profit determined on CSR. On the other hand, companies with smaller budgets required a longer delay to start spending their money, despite the small size of their budgets. Government data shows that the latter make up a significant portion of the companies that qualify under Section 135, suggesting that this long tail of companies requires significant support and retention.
WHAT PROPORTION OF YOUR CSR BUDGET IN 2015-16 WILL YOU SPEND?
A major obstacle during the budget planning phase is the capacity constraint within most NGOs to absorb large amounts of funding in a single year. Mahindra & Mahindra also has an Employee Social Options Program (ESOPs) that allows and encourages its employees to get involved in various CSR initiatives. Mahindra & Mahindra's perspective is that the NGO partner is more effective in engaging and mobilizing the community as they have a strong presence and good will in the communities they serve.
How does Mahindra & Mahindra allocate funding across its group companies?
Establishing
While many companies have dedicated CSR teams, a significant minority transfers the
WHICH DEPARTMENT OWNS AND MANAGES CSR INTERNALLY WITHIN THE COMPANY
Evolving role of CSR heads
From a company's perspective, the failure of the NGO partners to implement the program can pose a huge risk to the company's reputation, which is why companies are adopting practices that protect their interests. Legal departments around the world are known for taking the most risk-averse and conservative approach and may need support from CSR departments to understand the restrictive nature of processes in place. There are not many relevant templates of contracts and other documents available within the ecosystem that can guide a company's thinking.
Not enough is being invested in providing administrative support for NGOs
Interactions with companies revealed that many common corporate processes such as drawing up legal contracts, procurement procedures and granting advance payments before starting projects are suitable for the needs of commercial transactions. While companies understand the nature of business and financial risks well enough, their understanding of risk in CSR is limited. Consequently, their strategies to mitigate risks arising from CSR activities are not always the most appropriate.
Companies are currently focused on engaging communities and employees. However, there
CSR has favoured some social causes more than others
Some aspects such as capturing best practices within social sectors, evidence of what works and what doesn't, comparisons between different implementation models for returns and impact, detailed implementation guidelines, etc. Some sectors, such as human rights, are perceived as legally and politically sensitive given the complex nature of the issues plaguing these sectors.
SECTOR FOCUS OF COMPANIES
Partner
Companies preferred to partner with NGOs over social enterprises
Companies follow a variety of approaches to select CSR programmes, ranging from creating
It was mainly adopted by companies that did not have an immediate location preference or a clear beneficiary group, such as banking, financial services, insurance or IT companies, or companies that were new to the CSR sector and wanted to comply with the law.
GODREJ’S SALON-I
EKLAVYA BY CASTROL INDIA
As companies spend more on social development projects, there has been a unanimous demand
While indicators are more process related and relevant to impact investing, most of them can be easily adapted to CSR.23. Interviews with both NGOs and companies revealed that the evaluation of programs and impact is often seen as an end in itself rather than a means of generating intelligence for improving program effectiveness and impact. At the same time, it is important that the assessments are seen as collaborative exercises between companies and NGOs to ensure that CSR programs achieve their goals and contribute to social development, rather than as policing tools.
There is a lack of comprehensive reporting by companies on CSR
Reporting on CSR
SOCIAL
ORGANISATIONS AND SECTION 135
Corporate partnership lifecycle from the perspective of social organisations
Corporate Partnership Lifecycle from the perspective of social organisations
ORGANISATION LEVEL
Identifying corporate partners/servicing
Strategising existing or new projects
Implementation
Monitoring and
PROGRAMME LEVEL
Fund raising
Identifying and approaching
Which of the following means do you use to raise funds from institutional donors?*
Organisations with prior experience working with companies found it easier to close deals
Social organisations feel that “appealing to the heart” is an effective strategy
CSR could create a potential imbalance within the NGO sector
Defining the metrics at the beginning of the program is the best way to establish funder expectations and ensure that both parties' goals are being met. Civil society organizations stressed that companies and their implementation partners should work together to define metrics to measure outputs and results of a given project, and to establish funder expectations early on in the project. Civil society organizations maintained that it is important to keep the scope of a project flexible and adaptable, as dealing with communities or specific target groups is often complex.
Social organisations are willing to modify programmes if needed
Defining the scope and metrics to
The measures should relate to the expected results at the programmatic level, i.e. directly related to the beneficiaries, and at the organizational level, i.e. for the social organization and the financier of the company. Flexibility allowed for adjustments if key factors affecting the project changed or if unexpected circumstances arose during execution.
For example, some of Teach For India's (TFI) corporate funders were keen to add additional elements to the community programme, such as monitoring the sanitation facilities in the school. The project involved training community volunteers to deliver home health services in the community, something in which the NGO had no previous experience or expertise. One of the biggest challenges in working with companies is limiting contract length.
One of the biggest challenges in working with companies is the restriction of contract length
On the other hand, organizations that have not networked well or that have not engaged companies in the past will be more open to adapting or modifying their program. While the NGO was extremely successful in mobilizing the volunteers, they needed a significant amount of manual labor to operationalize the volunteers. The company engaged an intermediary agency to guide the NGO and streamline the program.
Social organisations believe that the CSR rules have placed a focus on better delivery
Social organisations struggle to raise funds for human resources and other expenses,
Implementation
Allocating resources and executing
For example, the OSCAR Foundation, a social organization working on leadership development through sports, is run by its coaches, and Teach for India's program is run by its colleagues. Funding for staff salaries was typically an area of contention, while review of project proposals and social organizations found it difficult to convince companies that good staff were essential for a well-functioning programme. For example, Teach for India's Support a Fellow program focuses on funding their fellows, which is primarily a human resource cost.
Social organisations feel that companies should play a more constructive and engaged
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E)
Reporting output and outcomes, and
Social organisations that evaluate projects place a strong emphasis on revisiting project
Revisiting strategy
Social organisations are open to partnering with each other
Corporate foundations are a direct challenge to the survival of social organisations
Additional findings from the study
ENVIRONMENT
Companies are divided on expectations on CSR guidelines
Companies would like more clarity on the intersection between CSR and business. They
Improving government-company relationships around CSR
Engaging companies: Swachh Bharat Mission
The Swachh Bharat Kosh created a sense of confusion among companies with regards to the
CALLS-TO- ACTION
- Adopt a strategic approach to CSR
The report has captured how the CSR landscape has developed over the past two years. The insights gained from interviews and research conducted for this report, combined with Samhita's own experiences, are distilled here to provide a broad roadmap for stakeholders to develop the building blocks of the CSR ecosystem. Create a CSR strategy – in consultation with internal and external stakeholders – that maps key strengths and competencies and matches them with the requirements at each stage of a CSR project's lifecycle.
STRATEGIC INTEREST
IMPACT-FOCUSED
CATALYTIC COMPETENCIES
Create, collate, and disseminate relevant
Knowledge and information about the ecosystem as a whole such as information on possible opportunities for NGOs, knowledge about CSR regulations,. Industry-specific knowledge, including industry trends, alignment with other regulations, and best practices and models for CSR projects. Create a common taxonomy of terms such as quality, impact, risk, scale, social returns, and so on within the CSR lexicon to create a commonality.
Build and augment capacity across
As mentioned earlier in the report, companies could provide training for internal staff to facilitate knowledge capacity building. Capacity building is required for government officials, especially at the district/block level, to help them understand strategic approaches, and. Facilitate capacity building of corporate and NGO staff through knowledge exchange roundtables and field visits.
It was also a crucial intermediary in institutionalizing the program within the PMC and municipal schools, to ensure that the capacity of the public education system is built over the long term. One of the first initiatives was the development of in-service support for approximately 1,800 teachers of municipal schools in Pune to improve learning-learning processes in the classrooms. In the second year of this project, PCC is responsible, among other things, for working closely with the entire PMC education apparatus to institutionalize the program.
CSR fund ― a means to encourage companies to support less
What is it?
How would it work?
What are the advantages?
Appendix A
Social enterprises become providers of certain services or provide technical advice through direct contracts with companies or are subcontracted by NGOs. 4 “Pharma firms will get CSR benefits only if they donate medicines to the poor”, The Indian Express, March 26, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/pharma- firms-will-get-csr - only-benefits-if-they-donate-medicine-to-the-poor/. 7 Utkarsh Anand, “India has 31 lakh NGOs, more than double the number of schools”, The Indian Express, August 1, 2015, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/india- has-31-lakh -ngos-twice-the-number-of-schools-almost- twice-the-number-of-policemen/.
Appendix B
Endnotes
27 “Pharma firms will only get CSR benefits if they donate drugs to the poor,” The Indian Express, March 26, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/pharma-firms-will-get-csr - benefits-only-if-they-donate-medicines-to-the-poor/. 28 Aanchal Magazine, “Swachh Vidyalaya Abhiyan: TCS, Mahindra account for 80% of completed toilets by India Inc”, The Indian Express, April 13, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/. 30 Aanchal Magazine, “Swachh Vidyalaya Abhiyan: TCS, Mahindra account for 80% of completed toilets by India Inc”, The Indian Express, 13 Apr 2016.
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