I really like Dave’s framing of “What” these national coalitions are doing - Advocacy; Funding and Transformation - this is a great way to think of how to prioritize activities. In addition to funding - there is also the mobilization and coordination of other resources - i.e product donations; marketing platforms and advertising to promote public health messages; coordinating volunteering efforts.
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Stephen - there seem to be a lot of good examples from South Africa. Did you also see the work being done by the National Business Initiative?
A Q1. What examples of national collaborative platforms to fight COVID-19 are there?
Recovery from Covid-19 is about jobs. The Global Impact Sourcing Coalition (https://gisc.bsr.org/) promotes jobs for the most excluded in the ever evolving outsourcing sector. It’s a multi-country, multi-sectoral effort to help those at the bottom of the pyramid get good jobs.
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The risk that we’ve seen playing out is that moving at speed leads to worse governance practices, increasing the likelihood that serious mistakes will be made. How do you see the health of governance practices in your networks?
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Hello, this is Marcelo Linguitte, from UNGC Brazil Network. Glad to be here
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Great question Katie,
The Business Covid 19 Coalition Emergency Taskforce (BCCET) was set up in Zambia following the first confirmed cases last month. We recognised that there would be a need to focus on two issues concurrently. Two issues, which would at times be likely to intersect.
Firstly, the health of our population, and secondly the health of our economy.
In truth, ours was not a coalition formed in our boardrooms or business parks, but online. WhatsApp groups were born, Zoom calls were made, and our usual greetings were replaced with “Can you hear me okay?”
In a country where a handshake can last half an hour, we had to be quick to adapt to physical distancing.
Our first meetings were long. It wasn’t uncommon for leadership to speak for four hours on a call, but we also made progress.
We had meetings with senior government leaders, wrote a paper outlining how Government could support business, and formed a health team with experts from Zambia and across the world. In week one, we received over $100,000 in cash donations.
BCCET is made up of a large membership (over 300 individuals) but a few key people doing much of the coordination.
We set up the Zambia Covid 19 Fund (and used our network to ensure this was managed by the Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants). Balancing speed with accountability is often a challenge in disaster response, so we reached out to Deloitte who agreed to provide auditing services for the fund on a pro-bono basis.
We’re really interested in sharing our work with others, so we’re delighted that this forum has been set up by the Business Fights Poverty team today.
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The Bangladesh crowdsourcing platform is also a really great idea that could be replicated - either using an existing business coalition or a targeted and collective funding effort through a new coalition - such as Kenya’s National Business Compact and its “Flexi Fund”
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In South Africa there are some other important examples of ‘lower level’ action by platforms. One is a collaboration between 2 business organisations - Business Unity SA and the National Business Initiative – in collaboration with govt to mount a WASH campaign to promote basic hygiene - hand washing etc - in areas where there is inadequate water and sanitation.
In South Africa’s clothing sector, the industry wage bargaining council had just finished its negotiations when the covid crisis hit - the business and labour unions negotiating parties were able to play a key role enabling furloughed workers in the sector to be the first to get the supplementary wage payment from the unemployment fund.
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Have you adopted principles to guide your work?
What kind of governance arrangements have you put in place?
Interesting that there seem to be a lot of examples in the clothing / garment sector - perhaps because there are strong pre-existing alliances and relationships?
Hi Dave, Yes I do - just mentioned the NBI/BUSA WASH campaign work - very important in this crisis, obviously… (full disclosure - I am working with NBI on other projects - a different topic)
Hi Emmanuel,
You’re so right. Striking that balance is key. We found that by using existing structures (in our case, the Zambian institute for chartered accountants, we could set up a fund quickly, that had good oversight. Deloitte also offered to provide our auditing pro-bono and this helped get a few donors over the line in terms of contributing in an area with a reputation for corruption.
Unexpectedly, they also made a donation to our fund. So it’s worth making the ask. Setting up new organisations can take a while, so it’s worth working under existing structures during phase 1.
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Another good example is, NRNA (Nepalese Diaspora community network ) expanded in more than 80 countries is collaborating with a high-level Government Authorities in Nepal and business communities ( both national and Diaspora led business community) to respond the immediate need of the Nepalese Migrants workers who are badly impacted by the COVID 19 pandemic globally.
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Yes Jane - maybe better than ‘funding’ is something like ‘resource coordination’ coalition
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Nafas was a purely private sector, volounteer based initiative aiming to leverage our management know-how, personal and business networks and co-ordination and management ability to bear and to help remove bottlenecks. We have been active in everything from building a clinic in 2 weeks, to shipping PPE gear into the country, setting up and equipping local facilities to manufacture PPE gear.
We have also been active in disseminating quality, easy to remember protocols to companies and individuals. One particular challenge of this crisis has been the avalanche of information and fake news, leading to many people becoming overloaded and not following sensible procedures.
Our third task has been to liaise with business and industry bodies and associations to identify the challenges of this unique event and to try and alleviate as much as possible given the economic situation in Iran
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That’s a very helpful suggestion, Sam. I’m going to take that on-board.
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Our second question today:
Q2. What are the lessons we can learn from these different examples? What are the risks, opportunities and best practice?
Agree with Sam’s point - harnessing either existing structures or existing relationships where there is already a level of shared understanding, trust and willingness to share credit with others is key. Even with the new coalitions, such as Kenya’s NBC, they were able to mobilize quickly as a result of existing relationships.
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Can you say more about this one, Ekanath? Sounds like a really interesting approach!
in Korea, there has been significant interaction amongst business associations and government. this is based on a strong social contract between government and the people, but mediated through long-standing institutionalisation of engagement amongst organisations in the private and public sectors. The president was elected on a platform of better managing emergencies, due to govt failure in an earlier crisis – the 2014 ferry disaster. Though there were some problems with govt’s slow reaction at first, now strong ‘social capital’ has overcome this, and Korea has managed the pandemic.
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