Social Issues Are Complex And Entrenched In India: Priya Naik, Founder And CEO, Samhita Social Ventures
While the CSR Law in India was enacted in the Companies Act, 2013, it is important to assess what the landscape of CSR looks like in today’s time and whether it’s being treated as more than just a compliance. Is sustainability being incorporated deeply into corporate strategy? Why is CSR relevant in today’s time? In an exclusive interview with BW Businessworld, Priya Naik, Founder and CEO of Samhita Social Ventures discusses the various facets of CSR in India, how the momentum with respect to CSR has increased, the role of technology in assessing CSR efforts and so on. Edited excerpts:
Has CSR in India actually taken up momentum, and is it actually being perceived as more than just a ‘compliance’? Have corporates incorporated responsibility deeply into their strategy?
Yes, CSR activity in India has definitely picked up momentum. Many companies were already doing commendable work in the development sector before the Companies Act, 2013, and, the need to comply drove a significant spurt in CSR activity.
Now, three years later, the scope and reach of CSR has expanded substantially. These days, when companies venture into a cause or scale up an existing programme, they think about how they can be strategic and adopt a long-term approach. They want to align their CSR to business objectives, use their core competencies and match the needs and expectations of their stakeholders. It’s still work in progress and although this may not be the case for all companies, this is a trend that we are seeing in the approaches of a lot of our clients and partners, many of which have large CSR budgets.
For example, Viacom18’s ‘Chakachak Mumbai’ campaign leveraged the media company’s communications and storytelling expertise to drive their sanitation initiatives. As part of this project, they renovated toilets in four slum clusters in Mumbai supported, by a communications campaign - carried out in a mix of colloquial Hindi, English, and Marathi, making the message clear and personable. The campaign succeeded in effecting positive behaviour change towards cleanliness and the use of the constructed toilets.
How has Samhita’s role in engagement with diverse stakeholder cohorts such as foundations, corporates, donor agencies and NGO’s led to the creation of impactful CSR projects?
Many of the gaps that prevent the social sector from realising the potential of the CSR opportunity, can be plugged by collaborations between the various stakeholders. Hence, Samhita has focussed on creating synergies between stakeholders - companies, foundations, multi-laterals etc. and has helped them to learn from each other’s expertise.
For example, large grant-making agencies have begun to incorporate the CSR opportunity into their strategies. They want to tackle social issues in a more collaborative manner, leveraging the expertise and resources of companies.
We are working on one such project with GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), a German development agency, and Villgro, India’s foremost social enterprise incubator, to develop company-incubator partnerships.
Even though Schedule VII of the Companies Act, 2013, allows multiple activities under CSR funding, the focus has largely been on sanitation, healthcare, education and so on. Also, working directly with social enterprises is a grey area for CSR since the Law specifies that only those organisations with non-profit certification can receive CSR funding.
However, there is a workaround – Schedule VII allows companies to invest in incubators, through different models, and through this, companies can contribute to the development of social enterprises, start-ups, and innovative products.
Due to the lack of awareness about this option and a preference for initiatives that directly affect the beneficiary, funding incubators was a largely untapped area of CSR. The project with GIZ and Villgro entails creating awareness about this channel among companies and the benefits they would get from funding incubators.
This platform has proved to be very successful. We have been able to bridge the information asymmetry and have created effective partnership channels for companies, and incubators or social enterprises to communicate with each other.
Another platform we are working on is in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector.
We are creating a WASH platform to implement the national goals of safe and sustainable sanitation. It brings together the government, companies, implementation partners, international agencies, and other stakeholders, to unlock private sector resources – both financial and non-financial. A lot of companies working on WASH have spent on developing the infrastructure. Now the priority is to focus on Behaviour Change Campaigns, faecal sludge management etc. and to get more companies involved in scalable sanitation programmes.
What are some of the highlights of the sector based research that Samhita has conducted in the CSR landscape and what are some of the key trends and developments?
Samhita conducts research to identify trends and challenges in CSR efforts in critical causes, provide solutions for those challenges and guide decision making of companies and implementation agencies.
Last year, with the support of The Rockefeller Foundation, we conducted a CSR study titled ‘Transforming India: The CSR Opportunity’. Most companies were supporting an average of 4-5 causes each with education being the most popular cause, supported by 81 percent of the companies. 60 percent of companies supported programmes in Livelihoods and skills, and healthcare. Water and sanitation projects were also common, because of the government’s call-to-action in the Swachh Bharat Mission. On the other hand, less than a quarter of the companies surveyed invested in sectors such as agriculture, clean energy, and human rights.
The study found that compliance was no longer a driving factor of CSR and the intent to contribute to development was a key motivation to engage in social sector activities. Companies also aspired to be more strategic in their approach.
There are some commonalities in the early approaches taken by companies in sanitation and education. For example, our report on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) showed that 75 percent of companies with sanitation programmes, invested more on infrastructure like construction of toilets and water facilities, even as evidence suggests that this will not reduce open defecation in the country unless combined with Behaviour Change Communication (BCC). However, companies avoided BCC, finding it to be too risky because of its high gestation period, the inability to measure impact easily and also a lack of knowledge. Moreover, the government set construction-related targets, driving more efforts towards supporting infrastructure programmes.
Our report ‘Mapping Education Initiatives in CSR’ revealed that 54 percent of companies with CSR in education programmes supported infrastructure projects like building schools, but again, more complex, game-changing interventions such as pedagogy, early education, community awareness etc. were unexplored.
In both sectors, however, there is a shift to be strategic, nuanced and create programmes prioritising the needs of beneficiaries.
How have reports like CSR in WASH, Skilling India and CSR in Education served as knowledge banks for corporates to better understand the CSR ecosystem?
Our research and knowledge reports are structured with the objective of identifying trends, opportunities and gaps in various sectors and also providing recommendations based on best practices. They work as data-based evidence for more informed decision making since the findings are relevant to all stakeholders in the CSR ecosystem - government agencies, companies, foundations, intermediaries etc.
The reports cover investments trends and outcomes mapped geographically and assessed industry-wise, serving as a fairly comprehensive guide to how companies are thinking. For example, our Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) report found that within sanitation, there is not enough focus on behaviour change, and our skills report revealed that while skill development sees a lot of investment in technical training, stakeholders do not give much importance to counselling and placement support. Our CSR in clean energy report reveals that the sector garners less CSR investment compared to other causes because of a lack of technical expertise and poor access to implementation partners, despite the evidence that energy projects can provide a spark to local economies and improve delivery of services in education, livelihoods, and healthcare.
What role can technology and impact measurement serve in improving the CSR landscape and transform CSR?
From both our experience, and the experience of our clients and partners, technology can significantly help CSR practitioners scale up reach and impact, and improve the efficiency of delivery. In the development space, multiple stakeholders work across the country on different projects; technology can bring together all the data and information required under one roof, making it easy to monitor, coordinate activities and make decisions.
We integrate technology into every step of the CSR lifecycle.
Right from the commencement of our research services (impact assessments, community needs assessments), we have been collecting data for all our research projects with low-cost tablets, reducing any scope for human error and increasing convenience and efficiency of field personnel. It also is beneficial for coordination between teams collecting data across the country for one large project, especially when working with multiple agencies or consultants for research, as it preserves data integrity and facilitates centralisation of the data collected.
Our Samhita GoodCSR platform uses technology to make the CSR process easier and intelligent. Companies, foundations, and implementation organisations can find suitable partners for their work through the Marketplace and SmartRFP.
The Project Management tool, GoodCSR Direct, enables users to monitor their entire portfolio, track the progress of programmes, and communicate it to stakeholders.
Samhita GoodCSR is a culmination of Samhita’s experience working with companies across the lifecycle of a project – from strategy to implementation to impact assessment. It automates tasks like searching and selection of NGOs and programmes, that usually takes some CSR manager days to complete. As a result, practitioners can focus even more on impact and quality, while GoodCSR takes care of some of the more mundane tasks.
At the end of the day, there is no greater validation of the success of a social sector programme, than the impact it has created and managed to sustain.
While robust systems of measurement form an integral part of a company’s business operations this does not always extend to CSR programmes. Most companies spend a significant amount of time and effort to quantify, monitor, and evaluate their business parameters allowing them to set targets, create benchmarks, track progress, undertake midcourse corrections and effectively cater to stakeholder needs.
Samhita has worked with some of India’s leading companies to assess the impact of programmes, to identify what worked and what didn’t, if and how the programme could be scaled up, and the additional elements that could be added to the programme. However, these are some of the larger, more established names in CSR. Even though we are seeing a movement towards assessing impact, it’s still not practiced across the corporate sector as a priority; this is core to ensuring that the full potential of the CSR opportunity is realised.
How is the public sector or the government serving as the third wheel for driving the CSR agenda in the country? Shouldn’t the government be the primary wheel?
The entire CSR ecosystem is interdependent. The government is the biggest enabler of CSR activities. Without policies, incentives, and government-driven initiatives, there would be very little scope for CSR to blossom in the country.
Each player comes into the social sector with their own strengths and limitations. Our work is geared to improve government-corporate relationships in CSR and to make the government at each level a key partner in development activities undertaken by companies.
The Government of Maharashtra is a key enabler to the WASH platform mentioned earlier. Samhita is working to identify, pilot and scale innovative solutions to sanitation in Maharashtra, combining behaviour change, innovative finance, digital technology and analytics, operations and maintenance and waste management
What are some of the hits and misses of the Companies Act, which has mandated the CSR requirement?
CSR is now a board-level agenda. This is one of the most significant outcomes of the Companies Act, 2013. The top management’s involvement in the company’s CSR initiatives can make the programme’s design more strategic and well thought out.
And of course, the Act also provides an additional source of consistent funding for the development sector and an opportunity for implementation agencies to learn from companies and their expertise.
However, there is some ambiguity. There is no clarity on whether CSR should be aligned to a business or not. If it is clarified, there will be a lot more activity in the space with regard to innovation and capacity building. Without such clarity, companies remain unsure of how they can invest to ensure tangible, sustainable impact.
What are some of the future plans and collaborations for research reports which Samhita is venturing into?
CSR in India is still young; it is expanding in scope and potential, day by day. To utilise this opportunity to create systemic change, it is important to keep track of how companies are approaching CSR, and analyse the spending and impact trends. We will continue to create reports that identify challenges and opportunities in critical sectors, for stakeholders that need such knowledge, and to enhance the impact potential of the development sector.
Our latest report on CSR in Clean Energy released in November, with the support of Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation and International Finance Corporation. ‘Energising Development – CSR in Clean Energy: What are India’s top companies up to?’ analysed the clean energy initiatives of the top 100 companies based on CSR spends on the BSE 500.
Of the 100 companies surveyed, only 39 of them invested in this cause area. There were many reasons for the relatively low participation in Clean Energy – its perception as a highly technical cause area, lack of available implementation partners, lack of communication about the need by most communities and so on. For example, most communities already have resources like kerosene for basic lighting and cooking needs, and therefore, don’t prioritise electricity supply over healthcare, educations, and skills.
Most companies preferred product-based approaches; 20 out of 39 companies installed solar street lights in rural areas and 18 distributed solar lamps or lanterns for household use.
This was also evidence of solar energy solutions being preferred over other forms of renewable energy; feasibility across geographies, an enabling policy environment, and financial incentives have ensured lower costs and ease-of-maintenance of solar solutions.
In CSR, companies are concerned about their exit strategies and programme sustainability.
In clean energy, there are diverse opinions about whether projects should incorporate co-paying models. The companies who were not in favour of co-paying were used to paying for the entire service and were skeptical about how the community would react if they were suddenly asked to co-pay. Companies with projects in remote or tribal areas with low-income populations were concerned about a beneficiary’s ability to pay. Those in favour of co-paying believed that it would make the product feel like a community asset, which would result in a higher likelihood of the community using it.
Companies mostly invest where they are present, so states like Bihar and Meghalaya that have a high need for energy but a low corporate presence, received a negligible amount of CSR funding in Clean Energy. On the other hand, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh saw high need for energy matched by high CSR activity. This can be attributed to progressive state policies that encourage the deployment of renewable energy. In Maharashtra and Karnataka, despite the low need for CSR in clean energy programmes, there was a high level of CSR activity.
Through the findings and interactions with companies heavily present in clean energy, the report recommends more holistic approaches to CSR in clean energy - incorporating behavior change programmes, create robust after-sales support and so on. It also suggests integrating energy programmes within a community development approach as this would directly impact other areas such as education, healthcare, and agriculture.
Has there been any instance that a CSR agenda of a corporate has served as a replicable blueprint for other corporates to emulate?
For various reasons, the CSR agenda of each company is different. However, while there may not be much replication of agenda, programmatic replication is not uncommon. For example, multiple companies working in the same cause area could tie up with the same NGO, perhaps in different regions, carrying out a large-scale programme across the country.
We are, however, trying to create a process blueprint for the CSR ecosystem, which can be used across sectors and cause areas, to execute CSR activities. This CSR framework is being created as an outcome of our experiences over the last few years and is based on deep research into what the sector needs. The framework does not dictate how CSR should be done, but it aims to define what a quality programme is and act as a guide using best practices.
Why is CSR important and relevant in today’s time?
Social issues are complex and entrenched, especially in India. To achieve the nation’s development goals, different players with a stake in the social sector need to come together and CSR creates a pathway for such meaningful collaboration to happen.
When we talk about CSR impact in India, we aren’t comparing it to the scale that could be created by the government or by multilateral agencies. However, even if we focus on one location, we can utilise the expertise and resources of companies to create systemic change and use it as a template for wider engagement among stakeholders.
