Asian firms lauded for exemplary social, environmental initiatives
M.R. Pridiyathorn Devakula, former Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand and member of AIM’s Board of Governors, is joined onstage by the 2015 Asian CSR Awards winners. They are: Sunam Sarkar, President of Apollo Tyres (3rd from left); Krip Rojanastien, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Chiva-Som (4th from left); Salina Ramli, Head of Stakeholder Management, Community Affairs, Astro Malaysia Holdings (5th from right); Sania Khan, Business Development, Buksh Foundation (4th from right); and Himanshu Jain, Vice President for India and Southeast Asia, Sealed Air Corporation (3rd from right). They are joined by AIM President Dr. Steven J. DeKrey (left), Asia Inc Forum Chairman Dato Timothy Ong (2nd from left), and Phinma Group CEO Ramon V. del Rosario, Jr. (2nd from right).
Companies from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Thailand were honored at the Asian CSR Awards on September 9, 2015 at the Shangri-La Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand.
The Asian CSR Awards recognizes companies that embody the principles of corporate responsibility in their business philosophy and operations, as well as programs that have achieved excellence in terms of services to stakeholders and innovative sustainable solutions to address pressing social challenges. The Asian CSR Awards, a featured event at the Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility (AFCSR), is an initiative of the Asian Institute of Management – Ramon V. del Rosario, Sr. Center for Corporate Social Responsibility (AIM – RVR CSR Center) and Asia Inc. Forum.
This year’s Asian CSR Awards recognizes companies in the categories of: Environmental Excellence, Education Improvement, Poverty Alleviation, and Health Enhancement. A CSR Special Impact Award, which recognizes outstanding programs that demonstrate significant sustainable impact and are innovative, replicable, and scalable. Meanwhile, the IntelAIM Corporate Responsibility Award (IACRA) is awarded to a company which CSR approach is embedded into its business.
“The Asian Institute of Management has been recognizing companies that have embodied the principles of corporate social responsibility for the past 13 years,” said AIM President Steven J. DeKrey. “Over these years, the impact of AIM’s corporate social responsibility activities include an increasing number of organizations across Asia, which have integrated CSR in their business planning, leveraged their core competencies to generate positive impact, and formed meaningful partnerships with their communities.”
Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd.’s AstroKasih Hostel and Eko Village won the award for education improvement. The AstroKasih Hotel and Eko Village in Malaysia aims to achieve equal access to education for students in remote rural areas by providing underprivileged students with comfortable living facilities and engaging them to improve their academic performance.
Over 100 students are housed in the hostel, where they have adequate kitchen space, leisure area, and store room facilities. This is also equipped with the KampusAstro Learning System, made up of an LCD TV, a multi-channel satellite TV decoder, and access to local and international education channels.
Buksh Foundation’s Lighting a Million Lives Program:Buksh Foundation won the award for poverty alleviation. Buksh provides clean energy access to rural villages in Pakistan that don’t have electricity, amid the country’s energy crisis in 2011. Buksh Foundation was set up primarily as an entity that provided impact investing and microfinance assistance. However, the organization realized that in order for more individuals to realize their potential, access to electricity had to be addressed.
“Over 63 percent of Pakistan’s population lives without electricity,” explained Sania Khan, Business Development of Buksh Foundation. “We aim to reach 4,000 villages by 2020.”
For health enhancement, Apollo Tyres Ltd.’s HIV-AIDS Awareness and Prevention Program won this award. This company manufactures and supplies tires worldwide, implemented an HIV-AIDS Awareness and Prevention Program targeted to the company’s employees, customers, business partners, and community.
“We recognized that truck drivers are the most vulnerable to HIV-AIDS,” shared Sunam Sarkar, President and Chief Business Officer of Apollo Tyres. “Our program has received assistance from the International Labour Organization and the World Bank, in terms of providing material on HIV-AIDS. We’ve worked with non-government organizations, state governments, and government and private healthcare providers. Our dealers also offered resources, such as space, so that we could reach our stakeholders.”
From 2000 to 2014, a total of 25 Apollo Health Care Centers have been established throughout India. The program has reached a total of 2,651,754 key stakeholders-beneficiaries.
This year’s CSR Impact Awardee was Sealed Air Corporation for its Soap for Hope program, which teaches at-risk communities to salvage soap slivers and make them into new soap bars. Soap is recovered from hotels then transported to a site where local residents reprocess it. These soap bars are then distributed to communities in need or even bought back by hotels. The program has also significantly reduced the impact of hotels to the environment, especially as a typical 400-room hotel generates 3.5 tons of solid soap waste per year.
To date, the program has expanded to 17 cities in 11 countries and partnered with 120 hotels and nine NGOs. In 2014, Sealed Air Corporation took 250 tons of waste soap and converted these into 1.9 million soap bars for the benefit of 160,000 people annually.
Sealed Air’s Soap for Hope program began in Cambodia, but is now planning to extend beyond Asia, launching in Africa and Latin America, linking up hotels with non-government organizations and local communities.
This year’s recipient of the IACRA is Chiva-Som International Health Resorts Co., Ltd. from Thailand. The resort was designed to adapt to the existing biodiversity and contour of the natural terrain, and built to have minimal impact of the ecosystem. The resort also makes use of natural resources in a sustainable and equitable manner as part of its overall design.