The CSR Manager’s Survival Guide

The economic environment has shifted, and not in your favour as a CSR Manager.

Inflation is eroding purchasing power, the naira’s volatility is unsettling budget cycles, and every department is being asked to justify its existence with a rigour that would have seemed excessive just a few years ago. In the boardroom, the questions are sharper, the scrutiny more intense, and the tolerance for anything that looks like soft expenditure considerably diminished. For the CSR and sustainability manager, this is the moment of truth. The work that felt secure during boom times is now vulnerable.

Programmes that were celebrated as visionary are now being interrogated as discretionary. The comfortable alignment between corporate purpose and social impact is being stress-tested by the hard realities of cost containment and margin protection. This is not a time for despair. It is a time for strategic clarity, for a fundamental rethinking of how you position your function, defend your resources, and prove your relevance in an environment where every naira must earn its place.

The first and most critical shift is in your own mindset. You must stop thinking of yourself as the keeper of the corporate conscience and start thinking of yourself as a strategic asset manager. The language of morality, while personally sustaining, is a liability in budget defence. It positions you as a cost centre motivated by values, which is admirable but vulnerable. The language of business, by contrast, positions you as a value creator motivated by returns. This is not cynicism but rather a translation. Your community health programme is not just doing good, it is reducing employee absenteeism by addressing the root causes of illness in your workforce’s families. Your sustainable sourcing initiative is not just protecting forests; it is insulating your supply chain from the price volatility of commodities dependent on stable ecosystems. Your employee volunteering scheme is not just a feel-good activity; it is a proven driver of retention in a market where replacing talent costs six to nine months of salary. Every programme you manage has a business rationale embedded within it. Your job is to excavate that rationale and present it with the same rigour that finance applies to capital expenditure proposals.

This requires a different kind of data than you have probably been collecting. Output metrics, number of beneficiaries, volume of waste diverted, hours volunteered, tell a story of activity. They do not, by themselves, tell a story of value. To defend your budget, you need outcome metrics that link your activity to business performance. This means partnering with other departments to access data you do not own. Work with HR to track the correlation between volunteering participation and retention. Work with operations to calculate the cost savings from your energy efficiency initiatives. Work with sales to measure the revenue impact of your brand’s sustainability positioning. This is not about claiming credit you do not deserve; it is about illuminating the connections that already exist but have never been systematically documented. When you can show that every naira invested in your community water project saves three naira in operational disruptions caused by community unrest, you have moved from charity to business case.

The second strategic imperative is to build internal coalitions that extend far beyond your immediate function. In tough economic times, the sustainability department is an isolated target. But when your programmes are championed by HR, Procurement, Operations, and Marketing, they become much harder to cut. This requires you to spend as much time understanding the priorities of other departments as you spend managing your own initiatives. What keeps the Head of Procurement awake at night? Supply chain disruption, supplier risk, cost volatility. Show them how your ethical sourcing framework reduces those risks. What is the Marketing Director’s biggest headache? Differentiation in a crowded market, authenticity in brand messaging, the rising expectations of Gen Z consumers. Show them how your community impact stories provide credible, ownable content that cuts through the noise. What pressure is the Head of Operations under? Energy costs, downtime, workforce stability. Show them how your green investments and employee programmes directly address those pressures. When you make your colleagues successful, they become your most powerful advocates.

The third element of survival is strategic selectivity. In tough times, the instinct is to protect everything, to argue that every programme is essential. This is a fatal error. It dilutes your focus, spreads your resources thin, and makes it impossible to tell a compelling story about what truly matters. Instead, conduct a ruthless prioritisation exercise. Identify the two or three initiatives that are most clearly linked to business value, most deeply embedded in operations, and most defensible on the basis of data. Invest your energy in protecting and strengthening these core programmes. For everything else, be willing to pause, scale back, or sunset. This is not failure; it is strategic discipline. It signals to leadership that you understand the gravity of the economic moment and are making tough choices accordingly. When you return to the boardroom not with a plea to protect everything, but with a clear-eyed proposal for what must be preserved and why, you demonstrate a maturity that sets you apart from peers who are simply defending turf.

The fourth survival skill is the ability to frame your work in terms of risk, not just opportunity. In good times, sustainability is sold as a way to build brand equity, attract talent, and capture market share. In tough times, these arguments lose their power. The conversation shifts to defence: protecting what we have, avoiding losses, mitigating threats. Your carbon reduction programme is not just about being green; it is about staying ahead of regulations that will soon impose costs on emissions. Your community engagement is not just about being a good neighbour; it is about preventing the operational disruptions that arise from unresolved grievances. Your supply chain transparency is not just about ethics; it is about avoiding the reputational and financial catastrophe of a forced labour scandal. The language of risk is the language that resonates in a downturn. It speaks to the fundamental responsibility of leadership: to protect the enterprise from harm.

Finally, invest in your own resilience. The CSR manager in tough economic times faces a particular kind of exhaustion. You are advocating for resources in an environment of scarcity. You are defending programmes whose value is often intangible. You are navigating the tension between the urgent demands of the business and the long-term needs of communities and ecosystems. This takes a toll. Build your support network, both inside and outside the organisation. Find peers in other companies who understand your challenges. Invest in your own learning and development, not just in sustainability topics but in finance, strategy, and leadership. Remember that your ability to serve the cause depends on your ability to sustain yourself. The work matters, but it cannot matter at the expense of the worker.