What We Do

The Social Responsibility Program implements its objectives through three program areas:

1) The Local Community Development and Stakeholder Engagement Program helps businesses realize value in the complex areas of social development, and the equitable distribution of benefits.

The Social Responsibility Program has gathered substantial expertise in Community Development and mainly works with IFC clients to design community development programs with direct links to business needs and relevant corporate expertise. The Program focuses on income generating activities for local communities and targets socially excluded groups such as rural population, indigenous people, women, etc. In Stakeholder Engagement, Social Responsibility helps companies go beyond standard public disclosure and consultation process with activities such as stakeholder capacity building, stakeholder mapping, large stakeholder meetings, consensus building exercises, etc.

One example of a Social Responsibility project in this area is Usha Martin Limited (UML) in Jharkhand, India. The project linked the company's community development fund, Krishi Gram Vikas Kendra (KGVK), with the Self-Employed Women's Association, India's most successful model of informal sector enterprise development for women.

2) The Sustainability Strategy and Communications Program helps businesses understand and operationalize Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in their operations so that they can mitigate risks and seize opportunities to maintain access to international markets and sources of finance.

The CSR strategy and Communications Program builds on early successes in strategy and reporting assignments carried out by the Social Responsibility team. This program area is driven by the demand from IFC clients who become increasingly aware of the benefits of integrating sustainability in their operations and seek assistance in sustainability strategy and reporting.

One such example is the assistance to Manila Water Company in the Philippines. The project put in place a management framework and performance indicators for CSR and assisted the company in reporting its CSR performance.

3) The Labour Practices and Human Rights Program helps businesses improve practices, assess impacts, and seize opportunities relative to human and workers' rights.

The Social Responsibility team works through its Labor Practices and Human Rights program to develop products and tools for use by the private sector in emerging markets to seize opportunities accruing from progressive approaches to workforce management and utilization. This program area seeks to help companies, primarily IFC clients, innovate in areas such as worker-management relations, health and safety, as well as programs to provide alternatives to child labor and to remedy discrimination in the workplace.

One example of ongoing projects in this area is a Human Rights Impact Assessment being conducted in partnership with the International Business Leaders Forum. The objective of this work is to assist companies identify the Human Rights issues associated with their business, provide them with a tool to manage and mitigate these impacts and help them seize opportunities to go beyond compliance requirements.

Program Areas
Community Development and Stakeholder Engagement	Labour Practices and Human Rights	Sustainability Strategy and Communications
stakeholder mapping and needs assessments stakeholder capacity building local community development planning livelihood and income generation	human rights impact assessment ethical supply chain worker-management relations facilitating freedom of association health and safety	assessments of social and environmental opportunities benchmarking of CSR practices articulation of CSR principles design of CSR strategies and action plans sustainability reporting
Good practice guides on a range of issues Web based dissemination of lessons learnt Organization of conferences, workshops regionally and globally Business to Business (B2B) exchanges