Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Africa is still lagging but where its carried, there is no collaboration or scaling up of projects that can impact on the quality of citizen’s life hence intended impact is yet to be realised as challenges such as lack of access to water, health, education amongst other ills still persist. On the other hand businesses are aware that a failure to engage the communities is costly through increased reputation risks, litigation and damage to brand amongst other negative impacts.
Various international companies and local companies in are embarking on sustainability to minimise impact on environment and society but all efforts are in isolation, unreported and non-scalable.
There is growing recognition that marrying the local knowledge of the communities in Africa with global reach of the multinational firms can create unique and sustainable solutions. The private sector cannot solve all problems but can bring technical and financial resources, disciplines of organisation, accountability and entrepreneurial to bear on the problems, CEOs must learn that the bottom of the pyramid markets require a new level of collaboration between communities, government and the private sector.
The Animus Sustainability Portal is a web-based platform that enables companies with a presence in Africa to connect with local communities (and other companies) to share evidence of best practice. We believe that, by giving both citizens and companies a voice and a platform, Animus will trigger the scaling of CSR across Africa.
The portal will
· Enable participating companies and institutions to engage with stakeholders, increase turnover, and improve branding, loyalty and entrance into new markets.
· Increase transparency, improve amenities, reduce environmental impact, and improve water access, health amongst many others for communities
· Gives citizens and consumers a voice and a platform from which to influence the actions of commercial organisations
The company, Animus Sustainability Portal was set up in 2014 with the intention of enabling the scaling of CSR across Africa, Animus’s co-founders have spent the first year preparing the ground and seeding buy-in from key influencers.
“ We aim to realign companies’ CSR visions with citizens’ actual needs. We want to catalyse a consumer-led process that will generate an audit trail enabling companies to see what is needed by the communities in which they are active,” explains Codra Masiiwa, Director and Marketing Specialist.
“We want to create a rush to the top between those companies that are already taking sustainability leadership roles and those that have been lagging.”
Ronald Chawatama, Sustainability Leader and Researcher of the evolving portal, picks up:
“Our research and interaction with various professionals in sustainability shows the demand for a broader environmental sustainability drive, with increased demand for (and use of) Environmental Social Governance (ESG) by investors.
“We are mainly targeting the African region as sustainability is still emerging, and its reporting is scant, or very negligible. Most of the reports are either available as pdfs on companies’ websites or hardly available at all. The print media has managed to cover and produce sustainability news feeds, however, the feeds are lost along the way as they are static and less engaging. Current sustainability communication is mainly one way, from companies down, making the most crucial stakeholder of sustainability reporting alien to the process.”
“As sustainability entreprenuers witnessing the type of issues we experienced growing up becoming more and more complex, yet still failing to demand the necessary attention from government officials, we were moved to take positive action,” explains Codra.
“Our view is that we can trust companies to do the right thing. They are already in the business of managing resources, so they should be able to turn around the problem of managing resources in a way that will ease the social situation and minimise or mitigate further impact.
“What we want to do is to commercialise the issue of poverty and in the process bring about scalable impact,” concludes Codra.
We are raising a sum of £300 000 on Go Fund Me to see through our campaign. Your contribution no matter how small will help to bridge the gap and redirect CSR programmes in manner that create real impact. We believe that CSR can play a major role in meeting country and international development targets.
– See more at: http://animus-csr.com/Animus-raise-funds-on-go-fundme.html#sthash.hcC6l0eg.dpuf
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