A Call for Cooperation in Behalf of the Powerless

Philanthropy and business must form a bold new alliance to combat world poverty, international assembly is told

Improving the lives of the world’s poor and powerless in the next millennium will require creative collaboration between voluntary organizations and businesses, several speakers told an international audience at a conference here last month.

But to be successful, they cautioned, such joint efforts will require partners in each camp to move beyond the mutual suspicion — sometimes verging on hostility — that has often prevented their working together in the past.

The conference — the third world assembly of Civicus — drew some 600 participants from more than 75 countries to the Philippine International Convention Center for four days of discussion about how ordinary citizens can become more influential in shaping the future of their societies. Civicus, an international organization that was set up in 1993 to promote such citizen participation, now has more than 500 members in over 90 countries. They include organizations active in economic and social development, as well as grant makers that support those causes.

Businesses in the developing world have a special obligation to help tackle social problems, said Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala II, president of the Ayala Corporation, the biggest private enterprise in the Philippines, in his keynote address. “We all pay for poverty and illiteracy, which sap the source of skilled workers, limit the market for our products, and strain basic public services,” he said. “We all pay for criminality and social blight, which scare away foreign investments and tourists. And we all pay for environmental degradation, which destroys the very diversity that creates and sustains life on a variety of fronts.”

In previous decades, “philanthropy was purely discretionary” for companies everywhere, noted Mr. Ayala, who also chairs the Children and Youth Foundation of the Philippines and is on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. Companies contended that they served society simply by employing people and providing needed goods and services.

Those days are gone, Mr. Ayala declared. “Corporate citizenship has now become a strategic priority,” he said. “Ethical behavior is not just good morally in a business environment; it also builds a sustainable competitive advantage.”

Not everyone was ready to embrace corporations as partners in development, however. Some speakers, in fact, identified the rise of market economies based on ever-increasing consumption and growth as a disturbing trend.

Rebecca Adamson, a Cherokee who founded the First Nations Development Institute, in Fredericksburg, Va., contrasted what she called “two competing world views: the Euro-American values of individualism, equal opportunity, private property, and accumulation versus the indigenous values of kinship, communal usage, sharing, cultural identity, and spirituality.”

As the market values of materialism, greed, and competition have gained high priority, Ms. Adamson said, indigenous people have become “the miner’s canary in a development process gone haywire.” Among American Indians in the United States, for example, the joblessness rate exceeds 85 per cent, she said, and alcoholism occurs at many times the national average.

Worldwide, she added, 20 per cent of the human population consumes 80 per cent of the resources, while 5,000 species of organisms become extinct every year. What’s more, 47 of the world’s largest economies are not countries but multinational corporations that by and large feel no obligation to support less fortunate citizens, she said.

“The rules of the game must change,” Ms. Adamson said. “These are not win-or-lose power-control scenarios any longer. We all lose.”

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Despite lingering questions about the wisdom of teaming up with multinational corporations, however, the Civicus board has identified “corporate engagement” as one of its top priorities. For the past two years, a committee has been busy promoting more alliances between companies and civil-society organizations.

Partnerships with private enterprise were barely a footnote at the first two Civicus world assemblies, in Mexico City in 1995 and in Budapest in 1997. Here in Manila, however, in addition to the keynote speech by Mr. Ayala, many of the panels and discussion sessions had a strong business element.

“Businesses should be doing much more than they are” to support the communities in which they do business, said Kumi Naidoo, the chief executive of Civicus, at a news briefing. “What business gives to the civil-society world is minuscule.”

But a flexible attitude is required, he observed, in promoting greater collaboration. “It’s naive for us to expect that businesses will make deep, sustained commitments if nothing is in it for business,” Mr. Naidoo said. “But so what if business benefits, provided that no principles are violated and that the interests of the poor are advanced.”

And civil society — the schools, churches, trade unions, news media, parent associations, and a host of other formal and informal organizations that operate independently of the state — is not foreign territory to business leaders, several of them noted.

“People in companies are also citizens, with our own desires for a better tomorrow,” Skip Rhodes, who manages corporate giving at the Chevron Corporation, reminded the audience at one session.

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While speakers urged collaboration between business and non-profit groups, Nigel Twose, who works on corporate social-responsibility issues at the World Bank, said that partnerships are not always a good strategy. Some joint projects can end up frustrating participants because of cultural clashes or endless rounds of meetings, he said, and in some cases, can produce poorer results than if the groups had worked on an issue separately.

What’s needed, Mr. Twose said, is more experimentation with different types of joint projects, particularly those involving small businesses and local voluntary organizations, as well as the identification of good practices that other projects can emulate.

Ezra Mbogori, a Civicus board member who directs an organization in Zimbabwe called MWENGO, which promotes development in Africa, called himself a “skeptical optimist” on the subject of corporate support. His group, after obtaining such support, had run a successful television ad campaign to help street children. Eventually, corporations were calling up to ask what they could do, said Mr. Mbogori. But to attract enough interest to get the project started, he added, “you almost had to threaten people” with the prospect of unfavorable publicity.

One promising collaboration, speakers said, is an arrangement between the International Youth Foundation and two companies — Nike and Mattel — to improve the lives of the companies’ factory workers in Southeast Asia. A pilot project involves 10,000 workers — most of whom are young women — at Nike footware and apparel factories in Thailand.

The Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, as the program is called, works in cooperation with the companies, local governments, trade unions, and non-governmental organizations to ask workers about on-the-job conditions and community aspirations, and then to help them with training, education, and other development aid.

“This must be a net win-win-win for corporations, N.G.O.’s, and the young people who are the program’s targets,” said Kevin F. F. Quigley, executive director of the program, which was started last spring. Other members of the Global Alliance are the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, St. John’s University, and the World Bank.

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The Philippine non-profit world was highly visible throughout the conference — especially since about 40 per cent of the participants were from the host country. The diversity of charitable organizations was also reflected outside the conference halls, where representatives of a dozen rural-development groups had set up booths to provide information — and sell handicrafts — in support of their work.

Several speakers noted the coincidental timing of the conference, which opened on the 27th anniversary of the declaration of martial law by then-President Ferdinand Marcos. The 14 years that followed that declaration were a period of sometimes-brutal repression. But the years also saw the emergence of many organizations that were started by lawyers, activists, educators, or ordinary citizens to challenge the government’s abuse of power.

Corazon C. Aquino recalled that the peaceful “people power” revolution that culminated with her election as President in 1986 was driven largely by “an awakened and aroused civil society” that had been spurred to action by the assassination of her husband, Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, in 1983.

“In large measure, we owe our restored democracy to the actions of a civil society that had realized the power of the people to overthrow an entrenched dictatorship,” said Mrs. Aquino, who left office in 1992.

But that democracy remains fragile today, she noted. “Our political system is weak,” Mrs. Aquino observed. “It is still based largely on patronage politics rather than on economic and social platforms for greater social equity. Poverty still stalks the land. Homelessness, unemployment, and hunger still drain our people of energy.”

Fidel V. Ramos, who succeeded Mrs. Aquino as President in 1992, reminded the audience that “martial law’s exactions and cruelties ironically brought into being a civil society that also included a good part of the professional military.”

But throwing off the yoke of a dictator does not by itself insure an equitable and prosperous society, Mr. Ramos observed. Democratically elected governments can still be influenced by dominant personalities who rule through favoritism and corruption, he said.

“We Filipinos are coming to realize that replacing the authoritarian regime with a representative system is the easier part of the democratic transition,” Mr. Ramos said. “Making democracy work for common people is the really tough job.”

Charismatic leaders guided the transition from authoritarianism to democracy before civil society was fully developed, Mr. Ramos noted. “But charismatic leadership — because it is temporary and occasional — is a fragile foundation on which to build enduring democracy,” he said. “Only a well-developed civil society can provide the dependable and durable mechanism for the limitation of state authority over a free people.”

It is critical, therefore, to buttress the institutions of civil society to guard against the return of authoritarian regimes, he said. “If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” he said, “then Civicus and its counterparts the world over are liberty’s Minutemen.”

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The eve of the millennium finds the world facing a daunting list of problems — from ethnic violence to human-rights abuses to environmental degradation to systemic poverty — with which the world’s existing institutions seem ill-equipped to deal, several speakers observed.

Neither national governments nor international bodies like the United Nations have succeeded in building democratic and peaceful societies, noted Graca Simbine Machel, an activist for women and children who has formed the Foundation for Community Development in Mozambique.

Similarly, she added, “civil-society organizations in many cases don’t develop a common agenda” but instead tend to focus on achieving their own narrow goal of their particular issue. The rare exceptions — such as the international campaigns to ban land mines and to persuade richer countries to cancel the outstanding debt of poorer ones — show what great influence private voluntary groups can muster when they join together to deal with issues that transcend their own specific interests.

The lesson is that “we have to organize,” said Ms. Machel, rather than pursue individual goals in relative isolation. Non-profit organizations “have to become a movement” that can mobilize their resources behind a common agenda, such as the elimination of poverty.

Setting that agenda, some speakers declared, is no longer something that can be done from above, by either donors or government agencies.

“The days of prescriptive remedies are over,” said Humayun Khan, director of the Commonwealth Foundation, in London. “You can’t prescribe cures for those who alone know the suffering caused by their illness.”

The Commonwealth Foundation is now completing a report that sheds light on just what agendas people would like to pursue. The report is based on interviews with some 10,000 people in 45 nations of the British Commonwealth who were asked to define their concept of a good society and some ways of achieving it. Their responses “showed a surprising degree of coherence,” Mr. Khan said. “All wanted to be part of the process of governance.”

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Civicus is now working on several fronts to promote more-active participation by citizens in shaping their lives. One project involves developing a means of assessing the health of civil society in various countries and regions. The Civicus Index of Civil Society, as it is being called, would supplement — or perhaps replace — the Civicus Atlas of Civil Society, published in 1997, which gave profiles of such activities in 60 countries.

The idea is for Civicus to measure the economic size of a country’s civil society, the legal and cultural climate in which it operates, the values it represents, and its contributions, using indicators that might vary from one country to the next.

The result would be a cluster of scores that would change over time — and could serve to signal areas where a country has succeeded or fallen short in promoting citizen participation. “This work is an act of madness, in a way,” acknowledged Mr. Naidoo, in a session that solicited reaction to the project. “The methodological challenges are overwhelming.” But the result would be an important tool that policy makers and others could use to analyze strengths and weaknesses of civil society at various levels.

Another potential role for Civicus involves creating an Internet site where people could find links to information about civil-society activities around the world.

The proposal, as outlined by Michael Brophy, chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation, in Britain, and the new chairman of Civicus, might include the development of a uniform list of non-governmental organizations working in various countries.

The site would help donors interested in specific countries learn which groups are doing work there, for example, while providing even small grassroots organizations with a chance to draw attention to their programs. Civicus is continuing to refine the idea to determine its feasibility.

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Civicus is fast reaching a point, some observers noted, where it must focus its activities to keep from dissipating its energy. With a small staff in Washington coordinating the work of volunteers in the six regions of the world, the organization cannot hope to be all things to all people, they warn.

Many conference participants called upon Civicus to become more active in promoting this or that cause, whether it be literacy, rural education, gender equality, or environmental protection.

But others see the organization’s primary purpose as helping to promote legal and political systems that encourage such groups while also enabling them to obtain the financial resources and public support they need to do their work.

At this stage in its development, Civicus still seeks to be inclusive. After speakers at previous assemblies had noted the relatively small number of young people at the conference, the Civicus board decided to take action. In August, it welcomed onto its board, as at-large members, three people in their mid-20s.

This year brought different complaints about exclusion. Although some 250 Filipinos attended the conference, there were very few participants from elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While some participants did receive travel stipends to cover some of their costs, observers noted that the cost of traveling to Manila — and paying several hundred dollars to attend the conference — was beyond the means of many grassroots leaders in the region.

The next Civicus world assembly is scheduled for August 19-23, 2001, in Vancouver, Canada.