The purpose of this meeting was to explore the current context for corporate social responsibility in Egypt and identify main focus areas – within the business and in the communities they are supporting. The aim was to uncover opportunities and identify challenges for more collaboration between CSR practitioners and their projects and to share and learn from each other’s work.
The flow of the day is outlined in the picture below and the harvest is attached.
The morning world cafe conversation highlighted the following three priorities for CSR in Egypt:
1) integrating CSR into the core strategy of their business
2) find new ways of engaging with diverse stakeholders
3) increase knowledge sharing and research on CSR
A quick mapping of current CSR projects of the companies present showed the following work areas: 1) education, vocational training and improving employability, 2) health, 3) women empowerment 4) issues related to the environment and 5) informal settlements.
In the afternoon we worked in open space around opportunities for collaboration and learning.
The topics discussed were:
How to interact with the government?
Pilot project – choose one of Egypt’s 100 poorest villages: education, employment, health
Build business model to create sustainable national impact in health and education
Initiating a national CSR strategy
CSR Knowledge Sharing Platform
Volunteerism
At the end of the day participants realised the work had just started and expressed that they were keen to continue the process of collaboration and knowledge sharing that had been started.
Welcome