Nkasiobi Oluikpe
The trajectory of growth is defined as a straight and broad path that takes you, not to any disaster, but to the most profitable stage for all stakeholders.
In the World Bank’s November 2022 State Action on Business Enabling Reforms report, it stated that Nigeria’s economic outlook is uncertain and that its ability to attract domestic and foreign investments was also crashing. It went ahead to say that the nation has to make hard choices or face a worse economic downturn in the months and years ahead.
“Urgent business-unusual choices are needed to avoid a scenario in which up to 80 million working-age Nigerians do not have a full-time job by 2030 and up to 23 million more Nigerians could be living in extreme poverty,” Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank Country Director for Nigeria.
However, in the face of the above report, all hope is not lost. One of the hard choices, as recommended by the bank, that the nation would have to make is making maximum use of its CSR projects.
At the heart of the four pillars of environment, economy, philanthropy and society in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practice, is sustainability, which is simply defined as meeting our needs for today without shortchanging posterity.
These four pillars, which are interconnected and interdependent on each other (environmental protection impacts the economy and society, a healthy society impacts all three, and philanthropy impacts all others), are ways through which businesses achieve a balance of economic, environmental and social imperatives, they could be used as a compass to build the country’s growth trajectory.
As CSR Reporters corroborated recently, one needs no soothsayer to know that the country’s growth trajectory has been on a steady decline. And the earlier corporates and public spirited individuals identify particular areas of concern the better for them and the society at large.
Beyond increasing organisational brand perception and overall business success, CSR, honestly and sincerely executed, is one of the vehicles through which Nigeria’s growth trajectory could be pointing to an upward direction.
When talking about growth trajectory, the focus is on the basic sector of the economy including the health sector: These include: Agriculture, trade sector, education etc.
The agric sector is the most important sector of any economy because it produces the food that sustains humanity. Of all the three basic needs of man, food is the one without which survival becomes impossible. Granted, the government should spearhead activities in the sector. But the fact remains that the government alone cannot do it. Private individuals and corporations also have a role to play here.
The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) published a report that indicated that a large proportion of the farmers in Nigeria are small-holders in nature. That because of their sizes, they only engage in subsistence farming and are based in the rural area. It however recommended that access to information could lead to increased crop yield.
Now here is where CSR should step in. There is no doubt that most corporate organizations are better travelled and are more disposed to meaningful information. As part of their CSR project, they can undertake to send expatriates in the field of agriculture to educate these local farmers on best international practices in their sector. Or even sponsor some of them on a capacity building trip outside the country.
Training them on how best to produce a high yield from their farms alone would amount to a waste of time and resources. As they come back, they should be provided with soft loans to probably engage in mechanized agriculture. Statistics have it that mechanized farming lowers post-harvest losses and improves productivity. They shouldn’t also stop at that, to get the best results, the organization should do a follow up to monitor what the farmers are doing with the knowledge and resources at their disposal.
If the bill or budget appears high for a single organization, two, three or even four organisations with the same passion can come together and pool their resources together to meet the desired target.
Another sector of interest that should attract the attention of the corporate organizations is the education sector. You know the regular talk that most Nigerian youth are not only unemployed but unemployable.
Here is a quote from a source: “The low budgetary allocation, a lack of industry-aligned curricula, a mismatch between employer needs and labour force skills are major challenges facing the education sector.”
From the above quote, it is obvious that there is a disconnect between classroom knowledge and labour force skills. That is one of the reasons why, for no fault of theirs, they are tagged unemployable.
Corporates and private individuals in various fields of practice can move to bridge this gap. They can sponsor various training programmes for these youth. Or even liaise with knowledge and skills providing organisations to upgrade these young ones to be fit for the labour market.
A few organisations, including Microsoft do this. But more are advised to join as the proportion of those that engage in it to the number of people seeking to be upgraded and fine-tuned is wide.
The NESC disclosed that the trade sector is the second largest employer of labour in Nigeria, with a high absorptive capacity, which means it is critical to job creation.
The deficient or woeful performance of this sector of the economy has been attributed to lack of competitive credit facility. Credit facilities in the country, where available, have been in two digits for so long and this is not helping matters. In fact, there is a common saying now that anybody starting a business in Nigeria with bank loans is bound to fail. Even with their high interest rates, they are difficult to obtain as meeting the conditionality for obtaining them is very difficult. Availability of credit facilities help the trading sector and other small businesses to meet their daily operations needs until their earning assets are sufficient to cover their working capital needs.
CSR can step in to address this key constraint. They should be able to identify a few serious sects of traders and make them beneficiaries of their CSR initiatives by providing them with soft loans. And in this case they can make the loans interest-free for these small traders. The timeframe for the refund of the loans should be such that the traders would not so much as feel the impact of the repayment process. In other words, it should be flexible.
As the saying goes, a healthy man is a wealthy man, or for shorts, health is wealth. We give it to some international charitable organisations and clubs who have been making all forms of donations to the health sector.
By their acts, they are consolidating the efforts of the government and helping to extend the lives of Nigerians. Some have donated different kinds of equipment and machinery to public hospitals, some even construct buildings to accommodate patients on admission in the hospitals. These philanthropic gestures have gone a long way to pull part of the burden off the shoulder of the government as well as ensure the wellbeing of Nigerians. But more is still needed.
All the areas mentioned here are livelihood enhancement initiatives which if properly and maximally embarked upon will definitely change the narrative for the Nigerian project.
