Responsible business for successful societies

“…I believe that it is part of building good sustainable businesses to help establish safe, secure, stable and peaceful societies. Business thrives where society thrives.”
Peter Sutherland,

Chairman BP and Goldman Sachs around “The business of peace”

One day you wake up and as usual you take a shower, have some breakfast and brush your teeth. Then you go out, take your car, or maybe a bus or the metro, for sure there will be a traffic jam or the metro will be crowded, you probably wont make it on time. Maybe while you are walking someone in the street asks you for money, possibly you see some garbage in the street, one or two people riding bikes and a pedestrian fighting with a man in a car.

Then you finally get to work. While you are sitting you realize that you left your laptop on for all night and perhaps one of your fellow workers arrives telling some news about an attack in Israel or a community in Africa that doesn’t have access to water and electricity.

But now is time to work, so you just forget about all these stories and visions for one more day at the office. Most of people go to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day; at the end you spend more time at the office than at home. So the question is: Do all these hours of work contribute with something good to your country? Or is it just doing the opposite? By saying this I don’t mean that you must work in Green Peace or that you have to be a volunteer in Africa. Businesses are business and you need a job, a house, food and a family. But what if the company that you work for could think not only in it’s own benefit and profit, but also in all the society, the environment, the communities and all families in poverty, like the one of that woman asking you for money at the morning.

We are used to think the government must take care of that situation, but reality shows us that we all; citizens, companies, civil society, public and private sector, must care.

For example, Colombia is a country with 47 million inhabitants and according to the Agencia Nacional para la Superación de la Pobreza Extrema (ANSPE) 14 million live in poverty, this is 32% of the total population. Almost 836.000 families do not have access to drinking water, and because of the armed conflict, 5 million of people have been displaced from their own land by violence. Despite all, Colombia is considered an emerging economy and an economic power in the region. The GDP by 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was US$378,713 millions. Taking into account that by 2000 this same figure was less than US$100,000 millions, this positions Colombia as the fourth biggest economy in Latin America nowadays. Although the world economy faces a difficult moment and most countries in Europe have recessive tendencies, Colombia reached in 2012 important growth rates in exportation achieving 7.6%.[1]

Source: Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia ANDI

Moreover, we can see two different realities, an emerging economy with an unequal distribution of wealth that keeps the 32% of the Colombians living below the poverty line and 10% in extreme poverty. This is also reflected in the results of the Millennium Development Goals for Colombia, where we can see that the country, although is working to achieve the goals, has very different results than the economics indicators.

As I have said, poverty is the biggest challenge mainly because the inequity, but to analyze just some of the Millennium Development Goals, we can see that although in the past two decades school places have been incremented in 2.178.000, Colombia seats in the ninth position between eleven countries in South America that have average schooling ages between 15 to 24 years. Likewise, speaking about gender equality and taking into account that 51% of the Colombian population are women; in average they just achieve 12% of the positions of popular election. To give one more example, in the infant mortality goal, between 1998 and 2011 the life of almost 6.000 children under one year were saved reducing thereby the infant mortality rate, even though nearly 8.000 children die annually.[2]

To see how is possible for a Colombian company to contribute to development; here is the case of Tiendas Juan Valdez, the Colombian brand of coffee world knows. Juan Valdez Café is a powerful initiative of PROCAFECOL S.A., the holding that administrates the shops, that lead to this brand, its owners and producers, to conquer with the quality of their product to consumers worldwide store.

Coffee has been for over 100 years one of the main engines for economic and social development in Colombia. The trade union for coffee, through the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) has constructed a model of economic and social development that has positioned Colombian coffee as the best in the world, generating millions of dollars in revenue and transferring direct benefits to Colombian coffee growers. The model is based on the collective savings and becomes a reality thanks to the Fondo Nacional del Café, that has been focused on ensuring the welfare of coffee farmers and their families through the provision of public goods, such as technical assistance, scientific research, promotion and advertising, value added business development or the warranty of purchase that guarantees the commercialization of the crop to market.[3]

Going back to the daily routine I described and to the idea that all of us can contribute by these activities to create a better place to live far from discouraging statistics, comes the idea of making business and companies a key performer of development by the implementation of better and responsible business practices. Companies in Colombia have a good economic context to construct for their business a sustainable model that benefits not only society and the countries development, but also their own industry.

In fact the UN Global Compact has established a commitment of how business can support the Millennium Development Goals and the UN General Secretary, Kofi Anan supports that “At a time when more than
1 billion people are denied the very minimum requirements of human dignity, business cannot afford to be seen as
the problem. Rather, it must work with governments and all other actors in
society to mobilize global science, technology and knowledge to tackle the interlocking crises of hunger, disease, environmental degradation and conflict that are holding back the developing world.”[4]

Furthermore, business have a more important goal than generate profit and contribute to national GDP’s, they have the assignment of creating wealth for areas as human rights, labor standards and environmental performance. For me the strategy must not be to pursue profit to achieve social benefits, but pursue societal benefits to achieve profit. In fact, the publication Business and the Millennium Development Goals of The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, has established a framework for action for companies in which are defined three spheres of influence that contribute to impact development: “Their core business activities – in the workplace, 
the marketplace and along the supply chain; their social investment and philanthropy activities; and their engagement in public policy dialogue and advocacy 
activities”.[5]

Colombia is an example of a so called developing countries that lives a good economic moment and has inmense opportunities to show how business can help development. I believe that when a company creates a strategy of sustainablity that is the heart of the organizational culture, is creating a new society, aware of the world’s economic, social and environmental problems and capable of changing their own every day life to the benefit of all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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