What is CSR?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) means a company’s responsibility to society should start with ensuring that it produces high quality products, and it does this with the least environmental impact and with the most benefits for its stakeholders its employees, consumers, local community, shareholders and others. Further this responsibility must be executed on a continuing, sustainable basis. Supporting a cause while intrinsically commendable in itself, comes later and even when it is taken up, it must necessarily have a direct relationship with the company business.

As a definition of CSR, the International Finance Corporation prefers: the commitment of businesses to contribute to sustainable economic development by working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their lives in ways that are good for business and for development.

The triple bottom-line (People, Planet, Profits) is a wide set of economic, environmental and social parameters used primarily to drive and measure an organisation’s value creation as a corporate citizen. The triple bottom-line concept forms the most common quantifiable gauge and driving mechanisms of CSR. The idea is that businesses can add value to society in three ways: economic, social and environmental.

The triple bottom-line ethos demands that a company responsibility and accountability be to stakeholders rather than shareholders, particularly at the cost of the former – with stakeholders referring to parties who are influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of an organisation.