Normalizing continuous collaboration between businesses, development organizations, and local worker centric organizations is key to building bridges and partnering more effectively. This includes candid dialogue on the realities of how sourcing communities are impacted in order to deliver relevant, meaningful, and coordinated action. Trust has been eroded in many ways between buyers and suppliers, and as a result, suppliers and worker communities.
Honoring commitments and purchasing practices while continuing to build strong working relationships across the supply chain that span from the business headquarters down to the informal, sometimes home-based worker will be crucial in building back better.
At the same time, businesses can enhance their due diligence process by assessing key aspects of social protection in their sourcing strategies. With greater understanding and tangible evidence of the impact of business decisions on workers, for example with findings GoodWeave and Awaj have observed on the impact of COVID-19 on RMG workers in Bangladesh, businesses can make better informed decisions that may also mitigate the blow of future shocks on their business and especially the people who work to produce their products.
Fantastic to see that companies are feeding back the desire for different financial support models other than technical assistance - this is something that we have seen could have been a potentially better route for some of the suppliers we initially engaged with to be a part of our (ETIâs) project.
In addition to Justin, we are also working with government and private sectors for developing partnership and linkage for the health and other opportunities for our beneficiaries. For that purpose, we are developing capacity of Community platforms so that they can take the responsibilities after the project life. but 10/12 months is very short period if we consider the sustainability
Initiatives like the NBCC can make a difference in times of urgency. These rapid models of collaboration can bridge the gap between potentially competing organizations and companies. Insofar, they can help unite actors with a common purpose for a time-limited period. Beyond that time period, important lessons can be derived and adaptation of pre-existing models of collaboration should result. The key learnings about agility and transparency from such partnership should enhance all models of collaboration.
Myriam, mainstreaming private sector involvement is without a doubt must. The shift from âCSRâ to responsible engagement with sourcing communities and our planet hopefully will continue to advance and become more sophisticated. Of course, we canât accomplish real change without including the community itself. Thank you for ID this is a must!
It goes without saying that Covid-19 has had a cataclysmic impact on livelihoods in Kenya. For the NBCC, partnerships have been critical in addressing this crisis. Itâs a juggle trying to assimilate the needs of stakeholders and keep everyone moving with speed and agility but we have seen that we have been able to deliver more with less and work with speed and agility because of this collaboration.
Thank you all so much for engaging! This was a very interesting and helpful conversation!
Hi Katie, Its a good question. To me it should be build on trust and flexibility. Demand and needs are very essentials.Since the situation is very unpredictable and sometimes we are not that much experienced on means to address
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On a more wider point, this discussion is really important. I would love to have the opportunity for not-for-profit organisations to have a round table discussion with FCDO, similar to the one on-going at present with businesses, to help input and inform FCDOâs strategic future.
It is a shame that it is a global pandemic that has forced many people to address and acknowledge issues that so many of us have been working on for years and years. As said before people have been talking about these issues but no one has been listening. If there is one good thing that comes out of this pandemic that has cost so many people their health and lives is that now hopefully those voices will be listened to.
Some really great points made here Emilie. We need to continually push to understand and ensure we are really working with those who are most vulnerable - which is especially difficult in a crisis, but are ultimately those who are most affected. In our experience this requires an excellent relationship with affected communities - and those who are not necessarily at the forefront of business supply chains - but are the farmers that sharecrop the land for the owners, the workers who are labour for smallholder farmers etc. Fairtradeâs Producer Networks have been critical here for us and our business partners - shining a light on these vulnerabilities, ensuring people have the confidence to come forward from decades of trust-building, and pushing to make sure programmes address their needs. A critical role in future business partnerships across NGOs/ donors & the private sector.
Justin, Iâd like to build on what you have said here because I totally agree with your 3 points. The comment I would make is that in my experience our NGO partners have been sometimes shocked by the passion that we bring to doing a great job in what we are doing and to some extent that we push hard to own our âfailuresâ and put them right. I fear that there is a historic âfear of failureâ with some NGO people that is occasionally connected to, âWell our Theory of Change saysâŚâ - in other words where ideology and philosophy meets practice and pragmatism can be a difficult crossroads! By the way I am not attributing blame, just observing experiences.
Hi Hamish, I have often found from my own experience from the non-profit side of the equation that in the past, there is often a culture of self-flagellation and the focus a lot of the time has been fixated on interrogating the âfailuresâ to a level that detracts from gains or positives made. Often there is a push to determine specifics such as unexpected consequences that have had a negative impact as a result without also capturing the positive impacts (without having to clarify attribution). I understand your point about owning failures and putting these right. Again, a lot of the time many organisations determine lessons learnt to capture this without a clear and organisational commitment to ensuring lessons are applied. There is a marked difference. But at the end of the day, we are very much tied to the purse strings of others and to ensure that these funding streams continue, we are pushed to only show the results within a VfM lens. Hope this helps. Happy to discuss this further if this helps.
Justin, Yes I see some of the behaviour you mention. The point for me is that in business we anticipate failures, we know we will have them, we call them, we learn from them, we adapt, we succeed - there is in essence less âstigmaâ attached to âgetting it wrong, acknowledging it and moving forwardsâ. From a business perspective we do NOT need our NGO partners to get 100% of things right, far from it, but we are both âbig enoughâ and âugly enoughâ to call it what it is, learn from it and move. It actually strengthens our willingness to invest more⌠To be specific an example is âunconditional cash transfersâ which are a well proven device for positive impact in refugee camp situations where there is very much a âuniformity of povertyâ (often caused by displacement) but we have seen that thinking âfail to computeâ in a supply chain environment where you are dealing with a âspectrum of povertyâ in a community. [BTW none of these observations can be done justice in a short text explanation].
I wanted to add this âJustin nails it here - our framework SDG Compact project with GIZ/BMZ has a 10-year agreement underpinning the whole programme. Individual projects may only span 3 or 4 years but the fact that both GIZ/BMZ and Symrise have made a 10 year commitment to work together, co-invest and exchange learning across projects is quite frankly, ground-breaking. The communities that we are engaged with know that when we start we will NOT be disappearing âat the end of the projectâ - the writing of the âend-lineâ report is merely another step in the journey and not the start of writing a new inspiring proposal for additional funding!â
Emilie, in my experience providing the access to affordable finance at community level needs a variety of solutions, selected to be appropriate to the local context - it could be VSLAs with small sums of money saved every week, it could be informal farmer associations with the opportunity to extend interest-free credit to a block of farmers and get it paid back later in a block, or it could be pioneering financial literacy training that helps farmers and their families better manage household financing, or more entrepreneurial âbridging financeâ that helps farmers make ends meet between sewing and harvesting, or harvesting and first level processing.
@linda For ourselves at Symrise we have very much been in the âdirect-to-farmerâ engagement model that is about co-creating with the farmer a responsible sourcing system - we are focused on their needs, but we do so through a lens of âdoing good business togetherâ and that we have found creates a relationship of mutual understanding and respect that goes way beyond the more traditional CSR philanthropy models. Our âsupportive ecosystemâ thinking also means that we create as many learning opportunities as we create âearningâ opportunities.
Hi Hamish - Yes I agree for workers, smallholder farmers or community members; microfinance; VSLAs; financial literacy training can all be transformative - but I was referring to access to finance at the business level (larger farms / factories / suppliers).
Yes weâre aiming to do that too - but in a slightly different way. Example is what we are trying to do with Farmer Processing Companies (FPCs) in India where the goal is to connect them to much lower cost forms of finance at the business level through brokering deals with financial institutions AND offering post-harvest finance with very rapid payments for goods received (effectively a dynamic working capital situation). Equally we are now formulating an intervention in Ecuador designed to assist business owners invest in technology solutions that will create added-value for them in a rapid period of time (<2 years) by effectively de-risking their business models. I presume this is the sort of the thing that you were thinking about?