Corporate Social Responsibility in the context of Youth Summit 2010

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development in its publication “Making Good Business Sense” by Lord Holme and Richard Watts define Corporate Social Responsibility as the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large. The 2010 Youth Summit mission is to empower young people to find the sustainable entrepreneurs within themselves in order to become agents of change in their environment and the world. Sustainability is the linking word between CSR and Youth Summit 2010.

The history shows that most companies that do not have a Corporate Social Responsibility policy fail, sooner or later. Regularly big companies understand this and set up strategies to assure their sustainability being social responsible. As examples we have: Vodafone, Europe’s largest cellular telecom company, it has programs like Mpesa, a pilot project that helps Africans do banking with their mobile phones. Vodafone has also changed the way it builds networks to give emergency healthcare workers better access, and helps screen mobile video content for users with kids. BP produces voluminous, and externally verified, reports on its environmental impacts. It’s always asking outsiders how it can do better. And CSR likely did help mitigate the damage from its mistakes. Also a good example is Royal Dutch Shell that has sunk significant investment into liquefied gas as an alternative fuel to gasoline and has been an active trader on Europe’s carbon emissions markets.

What it has to be done in order to increase the number of this kind of companies may be one of question to be answered at Youth Summit 2010.

In my country green entrepreneurship is in an incipient phase of understanding and only big foreign companies use it, because we are a developing country, where people think only about profit even we have a lot of social problems and how one GEF member commented on my post on the Business Idea blog: “every unsatisfied need creates an opportunity to run a good business” so I think we should explain in the most reasonable way this idea to all companies or future entrepreneurs. And that is where the Youth Summit comes in.

An other impediment in accepting CSR by most companies is that they are not able to see the advantages of being social responsible as business, they see CSR as a charity only, but CSR brings lot of benefits for companies too. The use of CSR brings economical success, because economy and stock exchange know more and more that sustainable oriented companies are companies for the future. An international survey brought the result that 70% of the consumers make their decision whether to buy a product or not on the basis if the company shows societal responsibility or not. Using CSR companies get the best workers, improve the relationship to customers and have security to shareholders and owners. And it benefits as part of society too.

One of Youth Summit objectives is to promote at a large scale the idea of green business, how it works and what advantages it brings to both company and society. It is expected that this summit has a big impact on young leaders, social activists or future businessmen, people that are or will be influential enough in their community to implement the idea of sustainable entrepreneurship and implicitly the CSR concept.

All these illustrations point out that CSR is part of green entrepreneurship concept, which is the topic of Youth Summit 2010.