Corporate Social Responsibility In Africa Research Articles

Challenges of CSR in Sub-Saharan Africa: clarifying the gaps between the regulations and human rights issues

This paper discusses the practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main purpose is to highlight and clarify the gaps between CSR regulations and human rights abuses caused by business organizations.From a historical perspective, natural resources have been recognized as a common reason for pushing the CSR agenda in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially with the presence of big businesses in the outcome of globalization. However, despite a development-oriented CSR agenda and therefore on African local needs such as hospitals, housing, and roads, big businesses that have embarked on CSR activities are often involved in human rights violations. This is despite the insertion of human rights in some African state regulations, the UN Global Compact, and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in which those businesses are signatories. This is the case in Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa whose regulations were established by the respective states indicate business’ broader societal priorities directed towards stakeholders (local communities in particular) but in terms of corporate obligations, ‘Human Rights appear to be a blind spot in CSR’.The reasons for that are indicated in the findings of this qualitative inquiry, which reveals deep problems of corporate governance and little understanding of corporate human rights in domestic legislation. According to international law, human rights fulfillment focuses on nation-states as sole bearers. This means other non-state actors have indirect human rights responsibilities. Therefore, the challenge remains to extend and interpret existing domestic and international frameworks to include CSR alongside traditional state obligations. This could make corporate human rights more ‘applicable’ to businesses.Previous research by Visser and Amodu has focused on proposing models to respond to the challenges of CSR in Africa. This paper clarifies the challenges of CSR with human rights issues and suggests an extension of the current legislative framework covering CSR. The article is qualitative and has used a Desk Research study approach that includes published academic papers, government documents some secondary data such as case studies, interviews, and discussions.

A Reflection on Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa contrasted with the UAE and some Asian Nations

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is still a controversial theme in discussions about companies and what they do to benefit communities in which they operate and society at large, and many argue that it does not permit the maximisation shareholder value. CSR is nonetheless a significant matter to consider in any business conduct. A plethora of research proves that socially responsible companies benefit both themselves and society. A key benefit that emanates from CSR is ab enhanced relationship between a company and the community in which it operates. CSR must be leveraged by organisations who are committed to society and stakeholders. Only in this way can sustainable development be realised, and this must be done in a transparent and ethical fashion so that maximising profits do not remain the key drivers of CSR which is a mere façade as noted. Corporate social responsibility offers numerous advantages and strategic benefits to companies that adopt it and do so in a serious manner. This study aims to fill that gap in knowledge by providing a different perspective to the discussion on CSR in South Africa, using insights garnered from the UAE approach and that of some other nations. Keywords: Societal support, organisations, good governance, ethical practice, regulations.

Controlling owner type, state capitalism, and corporate social responsibility in Africa

AbstractResearch Question/IssueWe theorize tensions between the dual purposes of financial gains and social impact and examine how varieties of controlling owner type and state capitalism influence corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in weak institutional settings. Specifically, we investigate the impact of the state as a majority investor (via state‐owned enterprises) and as a strategic investor (via government‐owned vehicles such as sovereign wealth funds) on CSR.Research Findings/InsightsUsing 512 firm‐year observations from 2007 to 2015, we find that similar to a widely held corporation, state‐owned enterprises are negatively associated with social and environmental practices. Yet, when the state serves as a strategic supporter and investor (i.e., sovereign wealth funds), a firm tends to exhibit greater CSR practices. Our findings are robust to random‐effect models and the two‐stage least squares instrumental variable approach.Theoretical/Academic ImplicationsWe examine the influence of controlling shareholders on CSR with a focus on state capitalism in Africa, highlighting the role of controlling owners that may fill institutional voids especially when sovereign wealth funds are the largest shareholders. By focusing on Africa, this study broadens the understanding of CSR and controlling ownership by eliminating assumptions and preconditions stemming from developed‐country contexts.Practitioner/Policy ImplicationsThis study offers insights to policy makers interested in promoting social and environmental practices. As such, we disentangle the mechanisms behind social and environmental engagements by government, state investor (i.e., sovereign wealth funds), and widely held corporate investors, contributing to the understanding of underresearched domains and guiding not only managers but also policy makers. Our results encourage policy makers to pay attention to specific characteristics of state capitalism.

CSR in developing countries – the importance of good governance and economic growth: evidence from Africa

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the effect of public governance and economic growth on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, Nigeria and South Africa. It also assesses the trend of CSR performance in these countries over time.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a sample of five countries in Africa for the period 2012-2017. The multivariate regression model was used in testing the research questions/hypotheses. Robustness tests were performed to provide evidence to strengthen the findings of the study.FindingsFindings suggest that both good governance and economic growth are significantly positively associated with CSR performance. However, while good governance has a relatively substantial effect size, economic growth has a small effect size. Overall, both variables have a considerably low confidence interval ratio and therefore stand a good chance of holding up in future research.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis is limited to within-country effects, thereby forgoing the opportunity to explain between-countries effects. Second, the sample size is relatively small because of the limitation of data availability on CSR in Africa; hence, population generalization is not intended but theory generalization.Practical implicationsFindings have implications for studies on CSR performance in Africa that fail to consider the socio-political and socio-economic level of development as contextual variables in the research design.Originality/valuePrior studies on CSR have focused majorly on CSR performance–corporate financial performance relationship. Furthermore, there are several calls in the literature for research for a new direction on CSR in the context of developing countries, especially Africa. This paper responds to these literature gaps.

Corporate Social Responsibility in SMEs: A Shift From Philanthropy to Institutional Works?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is often characterised in the literature as unstructured, informal, and ad hoc discretionary philanthropic activities. Drawing insights from recent theoretical/analytical frameworks (i.e. Crane, Matten, and Spence, 2013; and Valente and Crane, 2010), and on empirical data collected from both Nigeria and Tanzania, we found that CSR practices in SMEs are much more nuanced than previously presented. In addition, SMEs undertake their CSR practices to varying degrees in multiple spaces – i.e. the workplace, marketplace, community and the ecological environment. These CSR practices go beyond philanthropy and in some instances involve institutional works aimed at addressing some of the institutional gaps in the environments where these SMEs operate. The paper makes a contribution by drawing attention to the multiple spaces of CSR practices amongst SMEs, and the institutional works they do, which are often taken for granted in the extant literature. We provide a unique perspective – by arguing that what is frequently conceptualised as philanthropic CSR in Africa is (or may include) ‘institutional works’.

A Critical Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility in Ghana’s Telecommunications Industry

While there has been extensive research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) across disciplines, there is still a dearth of research on CSR in Africa, south of the Sahara, which is one of the socio-economically marginalised regions in the global economy. Through in-depth interviews of employees at the management, mid and entry levels of the top four telecommunications companies in Ghana, this article explores the corporate sector’s commitment to CSR by critically analysing how mobile service providers manage CSR projects in their communities of operation. Specifically, this study examines how telecom companies utilise CSR to contribute to educational, economic and social development in the Northern Region, one of the most developmentally marginalised regions of the country. Using a development communication approach, our study assesses how multinational corporations (MNCs) can prioritise marginalised communities over profit in their approach to CSR management. We argue that telecom companies need to actively involve community members, employees and stakeholders in decisions about CSR management if they are to make any impact in their communities of operation. From these findings, practical and theoretical recommendations are presented to contribute to the development of CSR epistemologies and praxes in the Global South.

International Joint Ventures in Industrial Gold Mining, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Harm-Production in Sudan

Violent conflicts in Sudan, especially those in Darfur in the early years of the new century, led state and non-state actors in the United States to exert heightened pressure on companies to divest from Sudan, or to prove that their activities in that country do not contribute to the conflicts. In this case study of La Mancha, a company involved in a gold mining joint venture in Sudan from 2006 to 2015, I examine whether and how it reacted publicly to this pressure. I trace how corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the continuation of harm-production was treated in its public statements, what conceptual gaps are perceptible in these statements, and how they were (re)produced in US-based activist circles. On this basis, I highlight the selective acknowledgement of responsibility which is based on assessments of harm-production by external actors excluding those directly affected by it. More generally, the case study relates to debates on CSR in Africa's extractive industries, especially within the frame of complex business structures involving both state actors and foreign investors that make it difficult and nonetheless urgent to identify units of responsibility. I suggest that a communication disconnect during the process of identification can be adequately approached through a conceptualisation of this process as an “arena” of actors who relate to a common issue but not necessarily to each other.

Institutional Voids and the Philanthropization of CSR Practices: Insights from Developing Economies

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and conceptions vary across sectors and nations. However, there is a general tendency among academics and practitioners to present CSR in Africa as activities characterized by philanthropy due to the existence of institutional voids. This review of the current literature demonstrates that weak institutions lead to weaker bargaining powers designed through the historical and geopolitical institutional frameworks of international business and global governance systems. Accordingly, multinational corporations (MNCs) take advantage of such weaknesses to define CSR on their own terms by replacing the ideal responsible and sustainable innovations with ad hoc philanthropy that diverts the attention from the negative consequences of neoliberal ‘structures of accumulation’. This is akin to aid that hardly contributes to structural changes, but rather leads to complacency, corruption, dependency, boutique projects, disguised exploitation, and the misuse of corporate political power to achieve corporate bottom lines. The implications of the results are vast, and they are generalizable to all weaker institutional settings. Thus, weaker institutions create the necessary regulatory, political, economic, and governance climate that perpetuates a pattern of abuses and ethical violations that are then masked with philanthropy. It is argued that the fundamental institutional and geopolitical contexts within which MNCs interact with nation states cannot be ignored in any comprehensive analysis that seeks to meaningfully shed light on the comparative differences of CSR practices. The neglect of the web of contextual, historical, and geopolitical issues in which CSR is entrenched and framed diverts attention from the origins of the socio-economic and environmental questions to philanthropy as a final solution, which has hitherto been perpetuated with undesirable outcomes.

Strategy on Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa

Strategy on Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa

Exporting corporate social responsibility into Africa? The experiences of South African companies in Swaziland

ABSTRACTThe economic expansion of South African corporates across the continent is an evolving and contested process. This paper seeks to inform knowledge on the experiences of South African companies expanding into Africa by looking at the social investment approach of five large companies within South Africa and in their Swaziland operations. While social responsibility programmes are proving to be useful for the private sector, the experiences of these companies highlight the need for more studies to find evidence on the developmental role of major private sector players like South Africa in the region and the impact of corporate social investment and corporate social responsibility in Africa.

Contents and Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Website Reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Seven-Country Study

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries has recently received increasing attention, and scholars have pointed to the strong contextuality of CSR in the respective regions. Regarding the latter, however, sub-Saharan Africa has been scrutinized only marginally by academia. Moreover, empirical research on the impact of the institutional context has been scant, despite its attributed importance for CSR. Our article seeks to fill a part of this research gap by investigating CSR website reporting of 211 companies in seven sub-Saharan countries. The study’s aim is twofold: First, we identify to what extent sub-Saharan companies report on CSR and which contents they disclose. Second, by building on institutional theory, we investigate how the socio-economic and political environments influence CSR reporting. For this purpose, we examine the impact of country-level and company-level determinants. We find that the sample African companies’ CSR efforts focus strongly on local philanthropy and therefore differ substantially from Western CSR approaches. Furthermore, we evidence that GDP and level of governance standard positively affect CSR reporting. Our study contributes to the literature by empirically evidencing the contextuality of CSR in Africa and by explaining how specific country- and company-level determinants contribute to or hamper the development of CSR in developing countries.

Corporate Social Responsibility in SMEs: A Shift from Philanthropy to Institutional Works?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is often characterised in the literature as unstructured, informal and ad hoc discretionary philanthropic activities. Drawing insights from recent theoretical/analytical frameworks (i.e. Crane et al., in Corporate social responsibility: Readings and cases in a global context, 2013; and Valente and Crane, in Calif Manag Rev 52(3):52–78, 2010), and on empirical data collected from both Nigeria and Tanzania, we found that CSR practices in SMEs are much more nuanced than previously presented. In addition, SMEs undertake their CSR practices to varying degrees in multiple spaces—i.e. the workplace, marketplace, community and the ecological environment. These CSR practices go beyond philanthropy and in some instances involve institutional works aimed at addressing some of the institutional gaps in the environments where these SMEs operate. The paper makes a contribution by drawing attention to the multiple spaces of CSR practices amongst SMEs, and the institutional works they do, which are often taken for granted in the extant literature. We provide a unique perspective—by arguing that what is frequently conceptualised as philanthropic CSR in Africa is (or may include) ‘institutional works’.

The internationalization of labour politics in Africa

This article considers recent international labour standards initiatives in Africa in the context of structural adjustment and the globalization of production. It is argued that examining these initiatives calls for means of drawing bridges between African studies and critical approaches to international political economy. The paper seeks to draw such a bridge using Gramsci's concepts of crisis and passive revolution. Labour relations are increasingly difficult to manage owing to processes of casualization, informalization, and conflicts between states and politically independent organized labour. Internationalization may enable a form of passive revolution by projecting the conflicts surrounding labour issues into non-threatening arenas. This argument is pursued through a discussion of the changing role of the International Labour Organization and the rise of corporate social responsibility in Africa.

Corporations, human rights and corporate social responsibility in Africa: between neglect and inadequate policy direction

Corporations, human rights and corporate social responsibility in Africa: between neglect and inadequate policy direction

Ubuntu and corporate social responsibility: the case of selected Malawian organizations

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to operationalise the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the framework of Ubuntu in selected Malawian organizations. The intention is to analyze whether CSR can be applied cross‐culturally.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a result of a qualitative research study conducted amongst nine sampled Malawian organisations. It utilized a semi‐structured interview guide in the collection of data whereby key research questions were exploratory and descriptive in nature.FindingsThis paper finds that in the cases under study, the concept of CSR is being applied within the framework of Ubuntu rather than a Western‐oriented business approach.Research limitations/implicationsCSR does not operate in a vacuum. Its application depends on the prevailing cultural context. In the cases under study, Ubuntu values influence and facilitate the application of CSR activities.Originality/valueDespite the envisaged significance of Ubuntu cultural context to the understanding and applicability of CSR in Africa, there has been no adequate systematic analysis of the same. The paper is therefore filling this knowledge gap.

CSR as a tool to fight against poverty: the case of Mauritius

PurposeThe primary aim of this paper is to analyse the contribution made by business organisations in the fight against poverty in Mauritius. Whereas on one side businesses are flourishing and ultra‐capitalism is the order of the day, we are witnessing, in parallel, a growing level of poverty worldwide. This situation of paradoxes is not being dealt with effectively by governments, being more interested in attracting foreign direct investment. Civil society organisations, on the other hand, lack the resources to do so. The role played by the business sector is analysed in this work.Design/methodology/approachFor data collection purpose, a questionnaire‐based semi‐structured interview schedule, worked out through the application of the mixed‐methods approach, was devised and applied to a stratified sample of 33.3 per cent of the top 100 companies and the 19 locally‐incorporated banks, based on the stratified random sampling method. Secondary sources, mainly in the form of company publications were also used.FindingsMost businesses surveyed already have established procedures with regards to the allocation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds. They are willing to help in creating a better society whether through financial or non‐monetary means, and do have the resources to do so. However, presently, only 11 per cent of CSR funds are devoted to the fight against poverty. There is a need to set the priorities and to coordinate these efforts. What is lacking is the active involvement of business leaders and public figures. This is needed to create the momentum for setting poverty alleviation as a top‐priority of our social agenda.Originality/valueThis work contributes to the scarce literature on CSR in Africa by analysing the way business organisations in the Mauritian economy contribute to the fight against poverty through CSR. It provides an evaluation of what is presently being done, and proposes ways through which the business contribution could be enhanced in order to help more people in need.