On Thursday 24 June, more than 1,000 global leaders from business, governments, civil society, and academia are expected to attend the two-day United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit 2010 in New York, of which Nestlé is a Patron Sponsor.
The largest ever UN business event on the issue of corporate responsibility, its size reflects the ambitious scope of its agenda. Priorities are those issues ‘central to corporate leadership today and essential for the achievement of sustainable markets’, with focus on what is being done to support the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Some of my colleagues will be attending, using our second MDG report - released to coincide with the summit - to share Nestlé’s experiences of assessing its actions in relation to these time-bound targets.
As someone still very new to the company, the report was one of the first projects I worked on, and it was an eye-opening introduction to the scale of Nestlé’s operations. For example, I didn’t know that it is the world’s largest direct buyer of coffee, purchasing 780 000 tonnes a year, or that it annually spends more than CHF 20 billion on raw materials.
I initially found it hard to understand how a business of this size can make a real impact at local level, but one of the case studies that really stood out was Community Empowerment through Livestock Development and Credit (CELDAC).
This initiative involves Nestlé working in partnership with the UN Development Agency to enable female dairy farmers in rural Punjab, Pakistan improve their livelihoods by providing them with training in primary livestock management and milk production and giving them access to microfinance. A main cause of economic difficulty for these women is when their animals succumb to treatable illnesses, which happens frequently. This is because there are few vets in the region, and as these are predominately men it makes contact with female farmers problematic.
When something like this makes you begin to appreciate the complex local or cultural nuances of any particular development challenge, the idea of representatives from big organisations meeting at big events to talk about the ‘bigger picture’ may seem a little removed from problems on the ground.
However that would be to overlook the existing local engagement, experience, and capacity for technical implementation that businesses with a global reach can offer specifically national and local initiatives, and the transformational effects these partnerships can set in motion.
Through CELDAC, 3,000 women have already been trained in basic veterinary skills by certified female ‘Master Trainers’, and equipped with kits comprised of medical instruments, medicines, and vaccines – not only building their capacity to rear livestock more effectively, but enabling them to become socio-economically empowered. So successful is that project that it has been taken up as a case study of public private partnerships at Harvard Kennedy School.
CELDAC’s success shows what strong multi-agency partnerships can achieve. It doesn’t matter whether these are formed in the middle of Manhattan or in rural Pakistan, it’s the will to communicate and work collaboratively wherever you are in the world that counts.
You can download the Nestlé and United Nations Millennium Development Goals 2010 report here.
Nestle_UN _MDG_2010.pdf (1.64 mb)
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