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By Greg Hills, Managing Director
Skeptics often raise the corporate welfare question: “If it’s important to business,” the logic goes, “why is government funding it?”
This question surfaced when I attended an event as part of the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. That day, the United Stated Agency for International Development (USAID) announced its Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism (ICV), which creates an ICV facility that will facilitate significant scaling of ICV efforts for US companies. The facility will enable businesses to send their valued employees to developing countries to lend their time and talent in support of critical international development efforts.
Is supporting international corporate volunteering efforts a good use of taxpayer funds? How closely should corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts link with government priorities?
Engaging employees in international service projects has emerged in the last decade as a growing and strategic approach for corporations. I wrote about this trend in an FSG white paper titled, “Volunteering for Impact: Best Practices in International Corporate Volunteering.” Leading corporations such as Pfizer, BD, IBM, and Ernst & Young are sending top employees overseas to work on pressing international development issues. The individuals apply their technical skills in marketing, finance, and management to assist NGOs, government agencies, and entrepreneurs with creating jobs, providing health care, growing food, and educating kids.
The business and development opportunities of ICV are well documented. ICV programs benefit corporations by developing future leaders, increasing employee recruitment and retention, and creating strong business linkages in future markets. ICV efforts also fuel sustainable development through improvements in the operations and effectiveness of in-country organizations.
Despite these benefits, our research highlighted that ICV efforts to date have suffered from several challenges. First, most corporations have small scale programs, often sending only a handful of volunteers per year. Exceptions include IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (~250 volunteers annually) and Pfizer’s Global Health Fellows (~25 volunteers annually), but the majority of ICV efforts are very small and therefore do not generate significant in-house expertise and capacity to run programs and have impact at scale.
Second, most companies create go-it-alone strategies, that don’t coordinate their volunteers with other ICV efforts. Work in the same countries on similar issues are often planned and coordinated by different people on different timelines with different motivations.
Third, ICV programs have typically underutilized in-country knowledge, programming, and assets. Corporations typically partner with NGO intermediaries to match volunteers to organizations, but efforts rarely integrate with the identified needs of in-country development actors such as USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), bilateral donors that offer decades of in-country knowledge and relationships.
Given these challenges to the current ICV landscape, USAID’s new Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism represents a welcome public-private partnership opportunity for the US Government. It bridges critical gaps in the potential effectiveness of ICV efforts so that corporations don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” for how to execute, coordinate, and operate strong ICV efforts. It embodies the Obama administration’s use of “smart power” as an effective tool of development by embracing the best and brightest of the US business community to work hand-in-hand to create development solutions.
The new Alliance will also hopefully create additional opportunities for more corporations to partner with each other. With increased visibility and coordination, ICV corporate partnerships will move beyond the traditional area of disaster relief (e.g., tsunamis and earthquakes) and focus on proactive and strategic opportunities. Finally, the facility draws upon the knowledge, plans, and contacts of the in-country USAID missions to identify and refine in-country efforts. This leverages the US government’s “boots on the ground,” to make corporate America’s ICV efforts more productive and effective.
Solving our most difficult global problems requires moving beyond single actor solutions to integrate the best efforts of corporations, foundations, nonprofits, and governments to achieve collective impact. The Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism signals a positive step in that direction and that is smart development.
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Skeptics often raise the corporate welfare question: “If it’s important to business,” the logic goes, “why is government funding it?” 
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