'All businesses start with a social purpose in mind'

In a panel discussion at the e4m Do Good Summit 2024, experts discussed the strategies and challenges of aligning business goals with social purpose. The panellists were Tara Chand, Head CSR, OAK NORTH; Abhishek Dubey,Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Muskaan Dreams; Nikhil Pingle, Chief Strategy Officer, MagicBus Foundation and Smita Roy, Co-Founder, Peepal Tree Foundation. The session was chaired by Ashish Srivastava, Director Program , SUVIDHA NGO.  

Chand said, “Our founders were entrepreneurs before. When they wanted to scale their business, establish their business, they went to a lot of banks but they did not get any loans because they couldn’t meet the criteria established by banks to get business loans. This is a challenge for most SMEs. Our research showed that accessing finance is one of the biggest hindrances for SMEs to scale their business. So we thought of solving this problem, we only cater to SMEs.”

He feels that all businesses start off with a social purpose in mind. “As a bank serving SMEs, we thought that our CSR purpose should also align with our business purpose. We decided we will promote entrepreneurship, the largest part of our funding goes to promoting entrepreneurship,” Chand said.

Pingle shared, “From a business standpoint, we have close to 25000 crore CSR funding every year. Seems like a large amount, divide that by the population, it comes to Rs 200 per person. It is our responsibility as CSRs and NGOs to align the funding firstly to the right purpose. It is a huge responsibility.” He added that this is only from a funding perspective. The picture from a corporate perspective is different. 

“Corporates have a much wider base of assets; there are a lot of employee volunteer programs. Corporates can leverage their consumer base for the right social causes, when I look at all of these aspects put together, I see there is a gap and there is a long way for us to go,” Pingle said. He also highlighted that the issue also lies in measuring the impact of the social change that is being brought.  

Speaking about more challenges, Dubey said, “When you are executing the program, and somebody comes from the top and sits in the corporate office, there lies a lot of gap in terms of understanding. There are challenges no doubt, but we as an entrepreneur are here to solve those challenges. We work with corporates, we help them understand why it is needed.”  

He shared that Muskaan Dreams invites these corporates to visit schools in rural areas. He took the example of the extremely high temperatures that are going on, and how visiting these schools can help them understand what challenges the students and teachers are facing.  

Roy mentioned that Peepal Tree Foundation works with around 50-52 women across Delhi NCR. “It might not be a big number, but we have seen tremendous change in the last couple of years. Having said that, CSR also helps. With the help of CSR, the bigger numbers are achievable, but one needs to understand have I done whatever I thought of initially while starting? Ask ‘did I do justice?’ and then jump into the number. This is possible only through community participation,” she said. Roy feels that since India is a vast country, numbers are important, but it is also teaching small things like sustainability. Teaching even one child would make a difference.