Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) is it Attainable?

 In September 2000, 189 heads of state ratified the Millennium Declaration. The declaration was an unprecedented global commitment and one of the most significant United Nations documents of recent time.  It offers a common and integrated vision on how to tackle some of the major challenges of the world. 

This declaration has resulted in eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focused on reducing poverty, improving the quality of peoples’ lives, ensuring environmental sustainability, and building partnerships to ensure that globalization becomes more positive force for all the world’s people.

 What are the goals?

1. eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. achieve universal primary education

3. promote gender equality and empower women

4. reduce child mortality

5. improve maternal health

6. combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7. ensure environmental sustainability

8. develop a global partnership for development

 In the age of interdependence, global citizenship – based on trust and a sense of shared responsibility – is a crucial pillar of progress.  At a time when more than 1 billion people are denied the very minimum requirements of human dignity, business cannot afford to be seen as the problem.  Rather, it must work with governments and all other actors in society to mobilize global science, technology and knowledge to tackle the interlocking crisis of hunger, disease, environmental degradation and conflict that are holding back the developing world.

UN Sec-Gen, Kofi Annan

Feedback/Activity:  Please give specific examples in which OMMC Surgery can contribute or has contributed in the past, locally to the Millennium Development Goals.

Corporate Social Responsibility is there such a thing?

“Philippine society is like a small island of affluence in the midst of an ocean of poverty”

What is affluence? – living beyond what is necessary. 

But what is necessary – will be different from each individual.

How can you help others, when you don’t have the money to do so.

These were the thoughts that came to mind while I was in the Corporate Social Responsibility week Expo 2004 held at the PICC last July 9, 2004.  It seems ironic that a “profit-oriented group” be at the same time “socially responsible.”  Is it genuine responsibility, or were there hidden agendas. The expo sited 3 main components, “triple bottom lines” 3-Ps: profit, people, planet, which is equivalent to the following slogans financial sustainability, social responsibility, and environmental responsibility.

Business: Show me the Money!

What does it mean to be profit-oriented?  Basically it is getting as much from others with less. As much from others with less.  By its very nature a corporation is personified to a greedy giant.  How does a company get a lot of profit.  In simple terms, have a good product, make production efficient, lessen the expenses, while demand is high increase your price until the law of supply and demand equilibrates, the excess of these translates to profits.

A certain company X got too much profit from the sales of the past year that it encountered a problem, high taxes.  But since the bulk of taxes are being allotted to paying foreign debt, certain companies would rather give the tax in other ways. 

The Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility

At first it was just an out-reach project, to help a community by giving out a day’s worth of food or medicines. It did not have much impact on the community.  But media coverage made the event a BIG one. But it was just to fulfill a task, very superficial.

Because of the success of the previous event, the owners saw the truly sad situation of the poorest of the poor.  That they themselves got into philanthropic activities, they were involved in the next events.  Coincidentally most of the members of the CSR group are composed of family-owned businesses.  Examples are Lopez (ABS-CBN), Soriano (transport), Ayala (land/estate), Tan (transport/commodities), Sy (department stores).

Then the owners, policy makers assigned certain employees to focus on this field, on social work, and started to train internally on how to handle the task.  They eventually found out that, to truly address the needs of the community, they have to go out.  They asked what does the community need.  They started external training.  So the project became a year round event that it became a program, taking a pro-active approach, with full cost accounting of course, hence the corporate social responsibility program.

1^st comment:  Corporate Social Responsibility by itself is not genuinely social responsibility, they want to help, but the reason is because they have to get rid of the excess money, or else government will tax them a lot, 10% or more.  While they can give only 1% for the charities and be tax exempted.  I think genuine social responsibility comes from a burden from inside a person to find ways to uplift the lives of the poor, even sacrificing personal luxury.  It will manifest in the life the person lives.  “To Live Simply, so that Others may Simply Live.”

Feedback/Activity:  Do you think OMMC surgery has a genuine social responsibility program? Why or why not?

In what ways can you as a resident be socially responsible?

  2^nd comment:  For example, here is a genuinely socially responsible NGO, powered only by volunteer staff, caring for cancer patients, spending time together, looking for individual donors for support, or collecting money from the members of the organization to finance operational expenses.  This NGO, no matter how genuinely responsible, will not grow or worse will eventually not exist, because they lack financial sustainability.  A volunteer will at sometime need money to eat, send his/her child to school, or buy a house/clothing.  There is a global call to partnership.  A truly genuine socially responsible NGO partnering with a powerful rich corporation, trying to get exempted from taxes, will fill in the vacuum of each others need.  The test is on the NGO, 1. it needs to get itself known, 2. it must make the corporation-partner believe that this NGO will handle the money well.

Feedback/Activity:  An NGO fighting against lung cancer partners with a corporation making profit from cigarettes and alcoholic beverages is legal.  But is it ethical?  Is it moral?