Lack Of Corporate Social Responsibility In Pakistan?

www.pakpositive.com When it comes to corporate social responsibility, we have not seen many companies in Pakistan making an effort to do something extra-ordinary regarding this matter. Although we do hear a lot of companies giving donations and charity, but most of them have restricted themselves to philanthropic activities only. Is it fair to label philanthropy and CSR as similar or alike?

That certainly was the case about a couple of decades back. Companies simply used to write pay-checks and give them as donations or charity for a certain cause. I'm not saying that this was wrong at that time, or this is not correct at the moment. But companies have actually moved ahead with the CSR efforts they used to put in. As an example, we have all heard about companies helping the poor by providing them education, or visiting special schools to spend a day with them. This is certainly a good effort as an initial step. But the recent CSR intiative of Mobilink supporting the IDPs in the Swat region is one of the biggest examples I can think of when it comes to CSR in Pakistan. Through this initiative they are going to support 1,000 families for a period of 3 months with a total funding of approximately Rs 84 million. And as I said that not only philanthropy is not enough, Mobilink is also taking an active part in this activity by constant employee volunteer programs and monitoring.

Coming back to corporate social responsibility in Pakistan, I think companies should start moving ahead from simple philanthropic activities. In order to move towards the next step, they can start employee volunteer programs in order to show they really care.

It is about time that companies should seriously start thinking about giving something back to the society they operate in. customer service www.pakpositive.com