Employers as agents for change

What would be a better option? 

Employers as agents for change

In Issue 1 of Benefits^ALL Barometer Africa we pointed out that the question of social and environmental factors in Africa had already become a key concern of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and World Economic Forum (WEF). Guided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, the African Union Commission’s (AUC’s) Agenda 2063 provided early clues of the direction in which our conversations ought to be moving. After all, Africa was then, and remains, a place of rising investment flows in which the life chances of most of its inhabitants have diverged sharply from the growth story.

But in a 2015 UNDP report, entitled Impact Investing in Africa: Trends, Challenges and Constraints, the authors noted that delivering on the SDGs for Africa will likely require from US$342–355 billion annually. Given the domestic resources available, that suggested a funding gap of approximately US$130–160 billion. The harsh reality was that foreign direct investment options were also unlikely to fill that gap.

We believe, though, that there are other more impactful options that are closer at hand and easier to adapt to address the SDG aspirations for Africans. As we pointed out in Issue 1, we believe that the employer, particularly global multinationals, can play an instrumental role as a catalyst for change that benefits the host country, the employee and, of course, the employer. But this means that we need to move beyond simply seeing employee benefits as focusing first and foremost on retirement savings and income protection. 

One way to tackle the challenge is to go back to basics. Here we are referring to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. What was notable about Maslow’s work is that needs need to be addressed in a linear fashion – or even that ‘self-actualisation’ represents the ultimate achievement of humanity. Rather, its gift to our framework of thinking is that it introduced the concept of humanistic psychology – the fact that achieving our fullest potential, either as an individual, a corporate, or a country, depended on a societal underpin.

The more we can do to design a benefits framework that creates the broadest possible underpin to individuals and their families, the greater our potential for creating a stable corporate and country.

It will be a process for African employers – including the multinational companies who have had a lengthy experience in the areas of employee benefits and human capital development. Each country, region and business sector will have to be understood in terms of the socioeconomic challenges it faces both now and into the future. Then, for the time being, employers will have to play that pivotal role of ensuring that the lives of their employees and their families will be adequately underpinned – because it will be in their financial interest to do so and this value-add will be measurable.

With success will come a recognition by governments that it is also in their interests to support such initiatives, although, quite likely, there will always be a tension between the political interests of filled coffers and the longer-term interests of inclusive and sustainable economic development.

First, though, we need to understand the economic forces that will likely shape the world of work in Africa’s future. And from there we will need to start building a meaningful array of benefit options that best address the likely impact to employer, employee, state and continent.

This is what we will be addressing in summary form in our next and third edition of Benefits^ALL Barometer Africa 2019.