MUMBAI: Dentsu India’s social and development sector communication division, Citizen Dentsu, in partnership with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) India, has launched CSR advisory services, to assist corporates with their CSR planning and implementation.
The provisions of CSR Policy, notified under the Companies Act 2013 promises to be a historic milestone, as India becomes the first country in the world to bring social responsibility to the centre stage of corporate reporting framework. The real challenge, however, for the 6000-odd corporates above a certain size, who now will be required to plan, implement and report their CSR activities annually to their stakeholders, is really coming out of a familiar domain and diving deep into a much-talked-about, but fairly unchartered CSR territory.
It is precisely to assist companies to negotiate these challenges, that Citizen Dentsu and UNFPA have come together to launch the Citizen Dentsu-UNFPA CSR Advisory, a partnership uniquely poised to help create an ecosystem where CSR efforts will eventually benefit the client’s brands.
Citizen Dentsu, manned by a team of professionals, has years of experience in strategic communications for numerous development sector issues like child survival and safe motherhood, immunisation, HIV and AIDS, education, water and sanitation and environment. Besides, Dentsu companies all over the world work on CSR initiatives for many of their global and local clients.
UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) is a leading United Nations agency working across 155 countries. It has decades of experience in policy and projects linked to gender, health and human rights. In India, where over 50 per cent of the population is below 25 years of age, UNFPA strategically focuses on youth, especially adolescent girls and young women.
Both organisations will draw upon their local experiences, as well as, global repositories of iconic CSR case studies and expertise, for their clients here.
Emphasising the respective roles of the two partners, Dentsu India Group executive chairman and Dentsu APAC CEO Rohit Ohri said, “While Citizen Dentsu will work closely with clients in strategising and planning their CSR initiatives, helping clients extract the maximum through brand-CSR synergy, which we think company heads will be greatly interested in, UNFPA will provide technical support for projects undertaken by pre-evaluated and approved set of NGOs.”
United Nations Population Fund India representative Frederika Meijer added, “We have a range of CSR-ready projects that companies can partner on to meet their CSR commitments in India. More importantly, with UNFPA employing globally certified protocols to monitor and evaluate non-government and civil society organisations (NGOs), as well as their work, the CSR projects can be expected to be far more efficient and effective.” She believes that while there are thousands of field-level organisations ready to take up CSR projects, Citizen Dentsu’s experience with social and developmental projects in India and UNFPA’s inputs in terms of NGO selection and planning, monitoring and evaluation of projects, would be a clear and unique differentiator.
Rajendra Singh from Citizen Dentsu and Rajat Ray from UNFPA India will be steering the partnership. With both being seasoned hands in brand and corporate advertising, as well as in handling development-led projects, it is easy to understand why they have been picked for the task.
Setting up and managing in-house CSR divisions will require investments by companies in specialised skills, time and infrastructure. This unique and first-of-its-kind partnership - Citizen Dentsu-UNFPA CSR Advisory - can help companies with faster and customised solutions, without them requiring to make huge initial investments, while in the long run, passing on expertise to them through capacity building.
