COMPANIES from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Thailand were recently honoured at the Asian CSR Awards held on September 9 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.
The Asian CSR Awards, a featured event at the annual Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility (AFCSR), are given out by the Asian Institute of Management – Ramon V del Rosario, Sr Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (AIM-RVR CSR Centre) and Asia Inc Forum.
The awards recognise companies that have embodied the principles of corporate responsibility in their business philosophy and operations, as well as programmes that have achieved excellence in terms of services to stakeholders and innovative sustainable solutions to address pressing social challenges.
This year’s awards recognise companies in the categories of Environmental Excellence, Education Improvement, Poverty Alleviation, and Health Enhancement. There is also a CSR Special Impact Award, which recognises outstanding programmes that demonstrate significant sustainable impact and are innovative, replicable, and scalable.
Meanwhile, the Intel-AIM Corporate Responsibility Award (IACRA) recognises a company’s approach in embedding CSR into its business and integrating CSR into the larger organisation, as well as its strategies to promote CSR among internal and external stakeholders.
Pridiyathorn Devakula, former deputy prime minister of Thailand (C) in a group photo with winners of the Asian CSR Awards: Sunam Sarkar, President of Apollo Tyres; Krip Rojanastien, Chairman and Chief Ex-ecutive Officer of Chiva-Som; Salina Ramli, Head of Stakeholder Management, Community Affairs, As-tro Malaysia Holdings; Sania Khan, Head of Business Development for the Buksh Foundation; Himanshu Jain, Vice-President (India and Southeast Asia) of Sealed Air Corporation; as well as the co-hosts of the 14th Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility (AFCSR)
For Education Improvement, Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd’s Astro Kasih Hostel and Eko Village bagged the award. The Astro Kasih Hotel and Eko Village in Malaysia aims to achieve equal access to education for students in remote rural areas by providing underprivileged students with comfortable living facilities and engaging them to improve their academic performance. To date, they have achieved an improvement rate of 65 per cent in passing this year’s Primary School Achievement Test.
For Poverty Alleviation, the award goes to Buksh Foundation’s Lighting a Million Lives programme. Buksh Foundation provides clean energy access to rural villages in Pakistan that do not have electricity, which began amid the country’s energy crisis in 2011. The Buksh Foundation was set up primarily as an entity that provided impact investing and microfinance assistance. However, the organisation realised that in order for more individuals to realise their potential, access to electricity had to be addressed.
“Over 63 per cent of Pakistan’s population lives without electricity,” explained Sania Khan, a Business Development representative of Buksh Foundation. “We aim to reach 4,000 villages by 2020.”
For Health Enhancement, Apollo Tyres Ltd’s HIV-AIDS Awareness and Prevention programme was recognised.
“We recognise that truck drivers are the most vulnerable to HIV-AIDS,” shared Sunam Sarkar, President and Chief Business Officer of Apollo Tyres. “Our programme has received assistance from the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank in terms of providing material on HIV-AIDS.”
This year’s CSR Impact Award went to Sealed Air Corporation for its Soap for Hope programme, which teaches at-risk communities to salvage soap slivers and make them into new soap bars. Soap is recovered from hotels then transported to a site where local residents reprocess it. These soap bars are then distributed to communities in need or even bought back by hotels. The programme has also significantly reduced the impact of hotels to the environment, especially as a typical 400-room hotel generates 3.5 tonnes of solid soap waste per year.
To date, the programme has expanded to 17 cities in 11 countries and partnered with 120 hotels and nine non-governmental organisations. In 2014, Sealed Air Corporation took 250 tonnes of waste soap and converted these into 1.9 million soap bars for the benefit of 160,000 people annually.
This year’s recipient of the Intel-AIM Corporate Responsibility Award is Chiva-Som International Health Resorts Co Ltd from Thailand. The resort was designed to adapt to the existing biodiversity and contour of the natural terrain and built to cause a minimal impact on the ecosystem. The resort also makes use of natural resources in a sustainable and equitable manner as part of its overall design.
For more information about the Asian CSR Awards, members of the public can visit http://www.asianforumcsr.com/faq/awards.
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