Under the umbrella of the SuSanA Indian Chapter, the India Sanitation Coalition in partnership with SuSanA, held a four-week thematic discussion on exploring opportunities and challenges of corporate engagement in sanitation. This synthesis is a summary of all topics discussed in the forum about corporate engagement.
The discussion not only focussed on corporate engage-ment via Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but also took different forms of engagement like Microfinancing opportunities and starting a business in sanitation into consideration. Since the Companies Act of Section 135 from 2013 was amended to make it compulsory for them to spend 2% of their net profits on corporate social responsibility, sanitation has been one of the areas of attention.

Some of the barriers to corporate participation that were found include
• Lack of usable knowledge on best practices and scalable models across the WASH value chain
• Perception that it is difficult to find implementation partners, especially those with experience of behaviour change or community mobilization.
• Difficulties in quantifying and measuring impact, especially in terms of changing habits and attitudes
• Lack of clarity on what constitutes CSR as per Section 135, especially for companies whose products are aligned to WASH
• Difficulties in accessing government networks

Please download the document to see the the full synthesis report.

Bibliographic information

Jacob, N., von Falkenhausen, A., Bauer, M. (2017). Corporate Engagement in Sanitation Synthesis Document - SuSanA Indian Chapter online discussion SuSanA

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