
Interviews with five of Business Fights Poverty's key partners (Primark, Unilever, Anglo American, Standard Chartered and Mastercard Centre for Inclusive Growth) focused on two areas: first, how their companies are currently supporting social entrepreneurs, and second, whether and if so, how their companies are addressing the care economy through their workplace policies.
These questions yielded four overarching insights.
- Companies need to better understand how care impacts their business
- Workplace policies can be a stepping stone to working with care companies (e.g. responsible recruitment of domestic workers, responsible sourcing of cleaning services)
- Companies with extensive supply chains can help scale the business (they can essentially connect employees with social enterprises and act as a bridge to help access low-cost, quality care services)
- Philanthropic entrepreneurship programs could place a stronger emphasis on supporting caregiving businesses.
An interview with Natasha Kwakwa, Global Head of Impact at Standard Chartered
Why is social innovation important to Standard Chartered Bank and why did you develop the Entrepreneurship Programme?
Standard Chartered Bank is 170 years old and employs 85,000 people. We wouldn't be where we are today without innovation. Innovation underpins our thriving business. It's at the heart of our business and essential to our future sustainability. To understand and know our 59 markets, we must pay attention to the needs and aspirations of the communities in which we operate. Entrepreneurship is natural to us. In markets where there aren't enough jobs, small businesses drive growth. And a real gap still exists: lack of access to finance.
How did you identify the type of entrepreneurs you wanted to support? Through our community work, we decided to focus on two main areas. First, disadvantaged young women. We support them to become self-employed, livelihood entrepreneurs, because we recognize that if women are left behind, communities will not thrive and jobs may be scarce. So we are also targeting a second audience. We are looking for small businesses that are primarily women-owned and have the potential to grow quickly, for example by leveraging technology. We have never focused specifically on the care economy. But we recognize that we will be supporting entrepreneurs in this space, because women tend to invest in businesses that support their families and communities.
Does the support vary depending on what stage an entrepreneur is at? Yes, it is different. For entrepreneurs who are making a living, who employ one or two people, their needs and aspirations are different. We provide a lot of coaching and mentoring support through our staff and through our charity partners on the so-called “business 101” basics: how to set up, how banking works, how to raise capital. For our “Women Technologists Programme” and for growth-minded entrepreneurs, like Naom from Bena Care, who runs a business that provides affordable healthcare in the home for seniors with long-term illnesses, with the potential to expand across Africa, her needs are different. She has already built an organisation and has identified a big social problem with unlimited potential. That’s why we offer something like an “accelerator programme”. We partner with business schools to give them access to our network as a bank. We also have seed funding competitions to develop and test their ideas in the market. We need to get them out of risk and into a place where they can access capital. It’s about moving from a charitable pre-commercial organisation to a viable business that takes the step to being able to do business with a bank like us.
Has your company ever employed the services of an entrepreneur it has supported (e.g. sourcing services)?
While it is not our intention to make the small entrepreneurs we support through our philanthropy part of our business, there are some instances where we have invited our small businesses to make crafts for our clients’ events and have purchased them. That being said, as a business, we have a supplier diversity target. These suppliers tend to be much larger businesses than we target through our philanthropy and by 2025, at least 40% of new suppliers joining should be diverse, i.e. primarily women, black ethnic minority and disabled owned. We work with partners such as WeConnect International to help us achieve this. One of the challenges as a multinational company and publicly listed bank is that we are subject to a lot of regulations that are difficult for smaller businesses to deal with, such as know your customer, know your customer, data privacy and anti-corruption.
How does your company currently support women in the workplace to combine work and parenting responsibilities?
I have had two children whilst working at Standard Chartered Bank and I appreciate many of the schemes available to me. I think the most important thing is that the company understands that in order to join and remain employed by the company, it needs to offer a range of options and solutions. This includes hybrid working, but this will take different forms in different markets due to regulations. Globally, we offer 20 weeks paid parental leave, regardless of gender, relationship status or how a child became a permanent addition to an employee's family. When it comes to childcare, we offer different schemes depending on the market. In the UK, we participate in the government's childcare voucher scheme, which allows employees to reduce the tax they pay on childcare payments. Elsewhere, we provide nurseries and “mother's rooms” for breastfeeding women.
In our community programs, the pandemic has made all of us think smarter about how we can provide support to skilled workers in different ways while taking into account their caregiving responsibilities. For example, in Indonesia we have a large WhatsApp-enabled business support network of women small entrepreneurs. And when targeting women entrepreneurs and female participants in our programs, we consider the time of the meeting, the distance from their homes, how participants will get there. Are there online options, childcare options?
Can you imagine your company supporting entrepreneurs in the care economy? Yes, through our Futuremakers initiative we support small businesses that address these themes. If there is a clear business case for buying into this support for colleagues, this is something to consider as part of your employment offer. For relocating colleagues, we provide information to employees who relocate to work in specific markets. For example, if they have information about available housing, agencies that can vet potential workers (such as domestic help, childcare or elderly care providers) and the agency is women-owned, this can be a very attractive offer to us.
And finally, I see the care economy as the missing piece of the gender equality puzzle: ensuring that women have the time to pursue their education and careers. How do we compensate and incentivize companies and governments to make that space? How can multinational companies create advocacy within their organizations to ensure that care work is not seen as just women's work?
People who create the future
See more interviews in this series:
- Matthew Davidson, Senior Social Impact Executive, Primark
- Lisa Hawkes Global Senior Sustainability Manager, Unilever
- Zahira Soumaa, Head of Education and Community Skills, Strategy and Sustainability, Anglo-American
- Payal Dalal, Senior Vice President, International Markets, Social Impact, Mastercard Inclusive Growth Center