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| Date: 2025-04-07 Page is: DBtxt001.php txt00020667 | |||||||||
Webinar Event |
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess |
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Original article:
I am sorry I am late to this dialog. My name is Peter Burgess. I am post-career but still very interested in the big issues of our day. The idea of performance measurement has been central to my career, and it remains as important today as it ever was. The dominant metric in the modern world is profit performance of the business sector, and the associated company value / stock price that results from this. Because these metrics are in play, performance has improved over time. The metrics for social progress and performance are weak, and people have not progressed (in terms of quality of life) very much at all. Powerful rich companies and individuals don’t want social activities and success to get in the way of profit performance of their investments. The same goes for environmental progress and performance. ESG metrics are a big con. The set of metrics should be ESP … Environment, Social and (Economic) Profits. G for Governance is not a metric of performance but something quite different. My impression is that the business world in general wants to avoid the reality that in order for a business to have impactful social performance and be positive with respect to the environment, there will be a lowering of the profit performance. The challenge is for investors (and investment analysts) to value the performance of E (environment) and S (society) as positively as they value Profit. This cannot happen until there is widespread acceptance of metrics for ALL of these elements of performance. This is what I am trying to do with the TrueValueMetrics.org (TVM ) initiative ... a labor of love ... but also something that has huge potential. Others are working in the same space, but mostly their work relates to just a limited part of the overall socio-enviro-economic system. My position is that there should be comprehensive and coherent metrics that apply to everything everywhere ... and much more thinking in terms of people as the center of everything rather than the business organization and the investment community ... and of course, not ignoring the environment in the way it has been ignored during the past century or more. Technology is amazingly productive ... why is the world such a mess? Business is profitable, but costly for society and the environment !!!!!!!!!!!!!! PeterB / TrueValueMetrics.org Business Fights Poverty Business Partnerships as a Force for Good: A Tool for Rapid Collaboration? 1 Do you want live notifications when people reply to your posts? Enable Notifications caroline.downey linda 29d Absolutely - much better and ethical sourcing has a major role to play along with a level playing field for those first movers! 2 Reply myriam.sidibe 29d Initiatives like the NBCC can make a difference in times of urgency. These rapid models of collaboration can bridge the gap between potentially competing organizations and companies. Insofar, they can help unite actors with a common purpose for a time-limited period. Beyond that time period, important lessons can be derived and adaptation of pre-existing models of collaboration should result. The key learnings about agility and transparency from such partnership should enhance all models of collaboration. 2 Reply linda Linda Patentas myriam.sidibe 29d Myriam, mainstreaming private sector involvement is without a doubt must. The shift from “CSR” to responsible engagement with sourcing communities and our planet hopefully will continue to advance and become more sophisticated. Of course, we can’t accomplish real change without including the community itself. Thank you for ID this is a must! 1 Reply4 Reply myriam.sidibe 29d It goes without saying that Covid-19 has had a cataclysmic impact on livelihoods in Kenya. For the NBCC, partnerships have been critical in addressing this crisis. It’s a juggle trying to assimilate the needs of stakeholders and keep everyone moving with speed and agility but we have seen that we have been able to deliver more with less and work with speed and agility because of this collaboration. Thank you all so much for engaging! This was a very interesting and helpful conversation! 1 Reply JahirulAlam.Azad Dr.Jahirul Alam Azad KatieH 29d Hi Katie, Its a good question. To me it should be build on trust and flexibility. Demand and needs are very essentials.Since the situation is very unpredictable and sometimes we are not that much experienced on means to address Reply KatieH Katie Hyson Business Fights Poverty Team 29d That draws this LIVE element of this online written discussion to a close. Don’t worry if you haven’t posted yet - you can still do so at any time, simply by logging in and posting. And to stay in touch with the rest of this topic and to receive the summary insights paper bringing together this discussion do click here: https://businessfightspoverty.org/quick-register-partnerships-summit/ 3 1 Reply Reply Justin_CARE Justin 29d On a more wider point, this discussion is really important. I would love to have the opportunity for not-for-profit organisations to have a round table discussion with FCDO, similar to the one on-going at present with businesses, to help input and inform FCDO’s strategic future. 4 Reply caroline.downey 29d It is a shame that it is a global pandemic that has forced many people to address and acknowledge issues that so many of us have been working on for years and years. As said before people have been talking about these issues but no one has been listening. If there is one good thing that comes out of this pandemic that has cost so many people their health and lives is that now hopefully those voices will be listened to. 1 Reply JahirulAlam.Azad Dr.Jahirul Alam Azad KatieH 29d Q3- Build capacity of existing platforms, explore ways of regular communication and develop a process for consistency of support for longer term 2 Reply Emilie_Paradiso A3: A good starting point is with retailers / buyers / brands building relationships with their suppliers so that they are aware of the challenges they are facing and can quickly engage and mobilise the supplier to engage in the project. Working with NGOs that have a very good understanding of the suppliers operating environment, their requirements and challenges is really important to ensure that the interventions are delivered with suppliers and workers needs in mind. In addition, retailers / brands and buyers committing to longer term projects, to continue the good work undertaken during shorter-term donor funded projects and really maximise results. More longer-term partnerships would also mean that we are better equipped to quickly respond to any upcoming shocks – as the rest of the panel had mentioned, project start up is a lot smoother when there are existing partnerships in place. As a complete aside - cash transfers have been so successful at the individual beneficiary / farmer level in development programmes, I would be so interested to see this type of intervention replicated at the business level, providing suppliers with a cash injection when they most need it – I believe this could provide interesting learning for businesses, workers and supply chains. The reason I say that is because I do believe that there is a risk that we may not always be reaching the most vulnerable suppliers and businesses (and therefore workers!) if we are only working with suppliers that can commit the (sometimes quite demanding) personnel time (both management and workers) to engaging in these type of programmes. If any of the panel know of any learning on this – I would be interested to hear it. NSomervilleLarge Naomi Somerville-Large Emilie_Paradiso 29d Some really great points made here Emilie. We need to continually push to understand and ensure we are really working with those who are most vulnerable - which is especially difficult in a crisis, but are ultimately those who are most affected. In our experience this requires an excellent relationship with affected communities - and those who are not necessarily at the forefront of business supply chains - but are the farmers that sharecrop the land for the owners, the workers who are labour for smallholder farmers etc. Fairtrade’s Producer Networks have been critical here for us and our business partners - shining a light on these vulnerabilities, ensuring people have the confidence to come forward from decades of trust-building, and pushing to make sure programmes address their needs. A critical role in future business partnerships across NGOs/ donors & the private sector. 2 Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor Justin_CARE 29d Justin, I’d like to build on what you have said here because I totally agree with your 3 points. The comment I would make is that in my experience our NGO partners have been sometimes shocked by the passion that we bring to doing a great job in what we are doing and to some extent that we push hard to own our “failures” and put them right. I fear that there is a historic “fear of failure” with some NGO people that is occasionally connected to, “Well our Theory of Change says…” - in other words where ideology and philosophy meets practice and pragmatism can be a difficult crossroads! By the way I am not attributing blame, just observing experiences. Reply Justin_CARE Justin 29d Hi Hamish, I have often found from my own experience from the non-profit side of the equation that in the past, there is often a culture of self-flagellation and the focus a lot of the time has been fixated on interrogating the ‘failures’ to a level that detracts from gains or positives made. Often there is a push to determine specifics such as unexpected consequences that have had a negative impact as a result without also capturing the positive impacts (without having to clarify attribution). I understand your point about owning failures and putting these right. Again, a lot of the time many organisations determine lessons learnt to capture this without a clear and organisational commitment to ensuring lessons are applied. There is a marked difference. But at the end of the day, we are very much tied to the purse strings of others and to ensure that these funding streams continue, we are pushed to only show the results within a VfM lens. Hope this helps. Happy to discuss this further if this helps. Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor 1 29d Justin, Yes I see some of the behaviour you mention. The point for me is that in business we anticipate failures, we know we will have them, we call them, we learn from them, we adapt, we succeed - there is in essence less “stigma” attached to “getting it wrong, acknowledging it and moving forwards”. From a business perspective we do NOT need our NGO partners to get 100% of things right, far from it, but we are both “big enough” and “ugly enough” to call it what it is, learn from it and move. It actually strengthens our willingness to invest more… To be specific an example is “unconditional cash transfers” which are a well proven device for positive impact in refugee camp situations where there is very much a “uniformity of poverty” (often caused by displacement) but we have seen that thinking “fail to compute” in a supply chain environment where you are dealing with a “spectrum of poverty” in a community. [BTW none of these observations can be done justice in a short text explanation]. I wanted to add this “Justin nails it here - our framework SDG Compact project with GIZ/BMZ has a 10-year agreement underpinning the whole programme. Individual projects may only span 3 or 4 years but the fact that both GIZ/BMZ and Symrise have made a 10 year commitment to work together, co-invest and exchange learning across projects is quite frankly, ground-breaking. The communities that we are engaged with know that when we start we will NOT be disappearing “at the end of the project” - the writing of the “end-line” report is merely another step in the journey and not the start of writing a new inspiring proposal for additional funding!” Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor Emilie_Paradiso 29d Emilie, in my experience providing the access to affordable finance at community level needs a variety of solutions, selected to be appropriate to the local context - it could be VSLAs with small sums of money saved every week, it could be informal farmer associations with the opportunity to extend interest-free credit to a block of farmers and get it paid back later in a block, or it could be pioneering financial literacy training that helps farmers and their families better manage household financing, or more entrepreneurial “bridging finance” that helps farmers make ends meet between sewing and harvesting, or harvesting and first level processing. 1 Reply Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor linda 29d @linda For ourselves at Symrise we have very much been in the “direct-to-farmer” engagement model that is about co-creating with the farmer a responsible sourcing system - we are focused on their needs, but we do so through a lens of “doing good business together” and that we have found creates a relationship of mutual understanding and respect that goes way beyond the more traditional CSR philanthropy models. Our “supportive ecosystem” thinking also means that we create as many learning opportunities as we create “earning” opportunities. Reply Emilie_Paradiso Shinergise 29d Hi Hamish - Yes I agree for workers, smallholder farmers or community members; microfinance; VSLAs; financial literacy training can all be transformative - but I was referring to access to finance at the business level (larger farms / factories / suppliers). Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor 29d Yes we’re aiming to do that too - but in a slightly different way. Example is what we are trying to do with Farmer Processing Companies (FPCs) in India where the goal is to connect them to much lower cost forms of finance at the business level through brokering deals with financial institutions AND offering post-harvest finance with very rapid payments for goods received (effectively a dynamic working capital situation). Equally we are now formulating an intervention in Ecuador designed to assist business owners invest in technology solutions that will create added-value for them in a rapid period of time (<2 years) by effectively de-risking their business models. I presume this is the sort of the thing that you were thinking about? Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor KatieH 29d Katie, just a quick “watch-out” from the technical side. If you join the group in non-live mode, and you try to post more than 3 comments in a row you get blocked out - it means that only if someone else makes some form of contribution can you continue to add perspective. This is quite limiting (though I can understand why it is there during “live” mode). Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor 29d As a complete aside - cash transfers have been so successful at the individual beneficiary / farmer level in development programmes, I would be so interested to see this type of intervention replicated at the business level, providing suppliers with a cash injection when they most need it We often describe parts of our programme in Madagascar as being more about “Living Cash Flow” rather than “Living Income” because it is about targeted financial support at the most critical times of the year - allowing farmers to avoid high interest loans, reducing food insecurity and “lean seasons” and allowing them to reap the most benefit when they do sell their crops post-harvest. Reply Shinergise Hamish Taylor KateCooper 27d Kate, could not agree with you more. I co-designed the Symrise-GIZ SDG Compact programme to exactly address the “weaknesses” of the developpp.de programme (even though it was very good) and several of the points you mention Programme framework of multiple projects with different private sector partners (Symrise being the consistent one) + different NGO implementation partners in different locations, with different intervention packages designed along common principles Flexible co-funding agreements on pre-approved projects “in principle” allow us to prospect for private sector partners to co-invest and explore the solutions map knowing that we are not wasting anyone’s time. I’d be happy to set up an exchange with ourselves and GIZ so as we could share the learning from what we have achieved in establishing 4 projects in less than 2 years with a total 4 year funding envelope of EUR 20.0m of which only 35% is public. Reply Share Bookmark Reply You will see a count of new replies because you read this topic. 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