It’s not necessarily Nestlé’s role to provide education in communities, but as we’re serious about tackling child labour, if there is no school what can we expect a family to do?
A fundamental challenge is often in relation to human rights issues, including modern slavery issues, one or more tiers below a company in the supply chain. Partnerships with large suppliers and with NGOs working with them are starting to find more effective ways of enabling employees of suppliers to raise concerns, in ways that those employees can trust will not lead to repurcussions, and to ensure there are mechanisms in place for the companies to learn from, respond to and make redress when problems are found in this way.
Our third and final question today:
This is really nice! Thank you for sharing!
Be ambitious, courageous, and trust your entrepreneurial spirit! I have come across so many incredible intrapreneurs in large companies, non-profits and in the enterprise sector. It is 2019 and the time is rife for bigger, bolder collaboration to create social impact and financial results.
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Individual companies, even the biggest multinationals, may not have the market clout to effect meaningful change in their supply chains – at a sustainable cost – without working in consortia multilaterally with others in their sector, including their competitors. If a company isn’t in a position to lead on responsible sourcing in its sector/market, it should consider how to bring together similar businesses pre-competitively. An example of this is action is the Cerrado Manifesto
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@Nina - agreed, leverage pre-competitive efforts more aggressively.
At the same time, no company should underestimate the power of their voice, even if a relatively small actor. There is a role to play in engaging customers, encouraging behaviour change down the supply chain, innovating in sustainability and showing what is possible. It’s companies that take on these challenges that are better able to future-proof themselves and respond to changing consumer demands.
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We need to find the shared interest between businesses and others, a kind of sweet spot, and build on that to make partnerships which impact beyond our individual supply chains
Take deforestation in cocoa: deforestation and conversion to agriculture has been part of human development and human expansion for thousands of years. In the case of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, it is not just caused by cocoa, but by timber extraction and other cash and food crops. Even if we stop cocoa expansion, it’s no use if the forest is cut for another reason.
So business is working with governments and others under the ‘Cocoa and Forests Initiative’. This pulls together many but not all the actors (eg we don’t have sawmills in!).
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Additionally - for Company’s to better leverage NGOs to do the long-term, negative ROI, subsized work. And for NGOs to identify when and where doing that benefits their communities in the long-term, with the agreement to transition/leverage those linkages to companies to then scale that work profitably.
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Business has entered a new era of a stakeholder-centric approach. Businesses are being held accountable in ways they weren’t previously and facing significant internal and external pressures to think beyond their financial bottom line. At the same time, the pressure to deliver short term returns and to cut costs remains significant. In order to collaborate on a bigger and more impactful scale than ever before, stakeholders need to be honest about their constraints, but also willing to stretch outside of their comfort zone. Collaboration is not a one-shot deal, but rather a long time strategy.
As businesses develop their long-term portfolio of partnerships and collaborations, there is an opportunity to embrace new kinds of partnerships - those between big businesses and social enterprises. Unilever sourcing solar thermal power from an India-based solar energy company that also serves low income customers and public institutions; a global cocoa supplier partnering with a local enterprise to source organic fertilizer for farmers; a pharmaceutical company partnering with a Nigerian entrepreneur to procure drug authentication technology - each of these models represents more than just a procurement decision, but rather a choice to support social enterprises that can serve as powerful allies in achieving inclusive and sustainable business goals. These types of partnerships can complement other multi-stakeholder partnerships involving local and international governments and NGOs. Social enterprise partnerships are unique in their ability to discover new models for value creation, but they are not enough to assure that goods and service are produced in ways that drive equity, prosperity and sustainability.
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And one final point from me - where a company needs to level the playing field for doing business in a responsible, sustainable way, there might be a case for policy and legislation e.g. tackling illegal timber coming into European markets through the EU Timber Regulation…we’re seeing this happening in the plastics debate, with some companies now coming on board with the idea of a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles.
Are there other ways businesses and NGOs could collaborate to put the case for legislation to government?
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One newer area for collaboration between large companies, NGOs and governments is in helping to shape the enabling environment within the sourcing context. So as @darrell.high pointed out, it isn’t necessarily Nestlé’s role to fill in a schooling gap, yet the absence of quality education can be critically linked with child labour issues. Similarly productivity, skills and infrastructure issues are often major constraints within the supply chain, and solving those problems can offer real win wins for both the company and poor suppliers including smallholder farmers. But often this has to involve a full discussion between company, suppliers and local partners including government on different roles and synergies in the innovations that can help improve the enabling environment to the benefit of small suppliers, larger companies and local economies.
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To me, multi-stakeholder partnerships are a key success factor to positively impact society, today, we are more connected that ever before in many ways. Synergies are more impactful, efficient and productive. Partnerships allow you to scale-up faster, reach new markets, build new products and business models.
We need formal partnerships that are diverse and complement each other. To me, inclusive business models and hybrid value chains are two powerful frameworks that allow companies and organizations share a language and a mindset of collaboration.
there’s a good case for legislation, as some companies will never do the right thing unless forced
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a tension that arises in these partnerships is how much do we want to differentiate vs co-operation with others. differentiation brings more value to the company, co-operation may eventually give more value to society
Yes - and these kinds of initiative, perhaps bringing together both a range of businesses and other interest groups with different motivations, can be effective in overcoming the presumption that a single business lobbying for change is bound to be doing so for its own narrow interests (and against someone else’s). Where companies and other partners with different missions come together behind an issue, this can open up political space for action that can contribute to solving responsible supply chain issues that may be impossible for a single company to tackle alone.
@markmuckerheide, I’d be interested to learn more examples of how these types of partnerships enabled for scalable, profitable enterprises later on. From our end, we’ve sometimes seen subsidies distort the market and reaching a path to scale for NGO-turned-enterprise has been challenging.
I can share an example on how the Chamber of Commerce Foundation in Mexico worked with 15 social entrepenuers and 15 corporations during 3 years with two purposes: i) support social entrepreneurs in different areas by bringing experts from the corporations and academia, and ii) build a better understanding of the challenges of these organizations to prepare a public policy proposal, which at the end, it included a map of financial products and how-to guide for them to be able to access.
A brief summary of this project is here: http://fundemex.org.mx/archivos/Relatoria_Seminario.pdf It is in Spanish, however, I would be happy to share more over a phone call.