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Conclusions
Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction
ways in which the company could improve its pro-poor impacts. Specifically, the company will look at opportunities for developing a better understanding of low-income consumers in the light of the points raised by Oxfam. Through the contract-review process, UI will check to ensure that contractors in the value chain are meeting their commitments to workplace policies and standards, in particular on gender issues, especially in terms of the effects of their policies and standards on women. 5 Even where there is a shared appreciation of the benefits of an alternative supply chain, as in the black-soybean project, it is recognised that there are constraints and limitations on the viability of the model, and doubts about whether the model itself represents the answer to the problems of poor farmers. Where it can, Unilever will continue to work with a wide range of partners, including NGOs, to seek better, sustainable practices to reduce negative social and environmental impacts in the production of the agricultural crops that it purchases. 6 A persistent focus on the position of the individual living in poverty – whether man, woman, or child – is essential for developing sustainable poverty-reduction strategies. Oxfam held the line on this matter throughout the project, and the Unilever team acknowledged its importance. For a company like UI which interacts with people living in poverty, this mindset and the feedback that it creates offer an opportunity to increase the positive impacts of its activities and reduce the negative impacts. It also indicates that while a company has an important ‘product-delivering, wealth-creating, skills-transferring’ role, it is only one participant alongside other businesses, governments, international institutions, and CSOs in the drive for sustainable poverty reduction. For optimum impact, a concerted effort is required. 7 It was disappointing not to have had more time to explore the role of UI in the marketplace, the pricing and availability of its products, the purpose of brands, and issues involved in advertising. The sheer momentum of change taking place, not only in the marketplace but in Indonesian society in general, makes it very difficult to separate individual strands of cause and effect. In UI’s experience, consumers are keenly aware of value for money and quality, and are ready to reject any brand that fails to meet their increasingly sophisticated expectations.
Process and partnership: lessons learned from working together It was clear from the outset, and certainly reinforced by this work, that no single actor will be able to understand fully – much less resolve – the issues raised in this report. That being said, partnerships are not easy to develop and are even harder to maintain over time. Within this project, it has been particularly difficult to reach joint agreement on the text. The lessons learned by Oxfam and Unilever are listed separately below, even though many are overlapping. The nuances of the lessons learned reflect each organisation’s particular values and levels of understanding of the issues.
Oxfam: lessons learned from the partnership 1 This project represented a big step for Oxfam in its work with the private sector. Although we have studied companies and whole sectors in the past, we have never gone so far in exploring the motivations, trade-offs, and choices that companies make in their operations. The insights into the private sector that we have gained from this project will equip us for more powerful engagement in the future. 2 Could Oxfam have done this project on its own? We could not have assessed UI’s value chain without the help of UI staff and our review of their internal documents. Any analysis that we could have done by ourselves would have been incomplete and superficial. We now have a much deeper understanding of UI’s business operations and the full range of its interactions in Indonesia. Without this partnership we would have probably reached some wrong conclusions. This experience has reinforced for us the role that engagement can play in understanding and then influencing a company’s strategy. 3 At the outset, we expected to focus most of our energy on the research. In the end, most was focused on analysing and interpreting the data, and expressing the points of agreement and disagreement in this joint report. We were often frustrated by difficult negotiations over language, but we came to realise that negotiating a common text forced us to understand each other in a way that would have been impossible if we had written separate documents. The real learning came through these Oxfam–Unilever dialogues. 4 Once we started the analysis, it became apparent that the modest research effort undertaken to support this project would not provide the data needed to answer the initial questions that we had wanted to answer. We needed more time for research, and ideally we should have included follow-up research to fill gaps that emerged in our data. Having several types of evidence – Unilever’s data, facts from external researchers, and data that we gathered for ourselves through on-site interviews with research teams – proved to be very useful. We would probably do more of the latter if we were to engage in a similar project – particularly to strengthen the gender analysis, because gender-related
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