On 17-18 Sept, WOCAN maintaineda booth at the 7th Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Asia Summit in Bangkok, Thailand. At the WOCAN booth Jeannette Gurung, Executive Director and Nisha Onta, Knowledge Management Coordinator were able to share WOCAN programs with CSR Executives from various corporations.Most visitors were interested to learn more about Women’s Carbon Standard (WCS) and how to collaborate with WOCAN. There were450 delegates from 31 countries and71% of the delegates were from the corporate sector and 90% were from Asia.
The CSR Asia Summit is the annual flagship event hosted by CSR Asia which is widely recognized as the most innovative and thought-provoking conference on corporate social responsibility in the region. The theme of this summit was ‘Responsible growth, Inclusive development”, with the objective to address the challenging question for businesses in Asia: How is it possible to grow responsibly, ensure economic development is more inclusive, and make essential products and services accessible for all? There were more than 30 speakers from Coca-Cola, Standard Chartered Bank, New Britain Palm Oil Limited, Sompo Japan Insurance, Oxfam, Forest Peoples Programme, Shell, CLP Holdings, Sampran Riverside, VSO, Rio Tinto, The Asia Foundation, Novartis, Aviva Asia, Friends International, Telenor, UNICEF, Levis, Transparency International, IUCN, R.E.A. Holdings, Unilever, Swire Pacific, GBC Health, Becton Dickinson, Pfizer and many more.
The summit’s sessions were very thought provoking and gave an insight of where the CSR is headed and how various corporations are implementing CSR. Gender equality and reporting was discussed in various sessions starting from the panel debate on the first day which focused on responsible growth, inclusive economic development and the role of private sector in addressing Asia’s social and environmental challenges.
During the session on Women’s Entrepreneurs: Agents of Change, Sustainable Manager from The Coca Cola Company, Philippines shared the 5by20 program which is the company’s global commitment to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women entrepreneurs across the company’s value chain by 2020. At the same session Veroniquw Salze-Lozac’h, Director, Economic Development Programs and Chief Economists of The Asia Foundation presented the research on ‘Access to Trade and Growth of Women’s SMEs in APEC Developing Economies’, where she emphasized the lack of access to finance as one of the major barriers for women.
Another interesting session was on Creating Shared Value led by Chad Bolick, Associate Director, Partnerships of FSG and Richard Welford, Chairman of CSR Asia. The session examined the growth of interest in shared value initiative, exploring the spectrum of activities from corporate philanthropy to community investment to shared value. They emphasized that shared value is not philanthropy or sustainability, but a way to achieve economic success. They presented this new approach which NGOs can use to engage with the corporate partners. Chad also shared and invited participants to join the Shared Value Initiative.