BCG Middle East staff join in for annual community service day

The Boston Consulting Group has held its third annual Community Service Day in the Middle East, with 400 staff volunteering for a variety of causes across the region.

Last week saw 400 Boston Consulting Group staff-members from the Middle East join a range of activities across the region for the strategy and management firm’s third annual Community Service Day – held in conjunction with a number of local associations, businesses and NGOs including INJAZ UAE, the Al Ghurair Foundation for Education, and women-led tech accelerator Womentum.

“In today’s business climate, creating social impact is just as significant as creating economic value,” said BCG Middle East Managing Director & Partner Mustafa Bosca. “The Community Service Day reflects this notion by calling on corporates to realign their organisations’ core attributes by creating resolute, long-term strategies and business activities that bring about positive societal impact.”

The leader of BCG’s social impact work in the Middle East – including projects to improve the societal impact of private and public sector clients – Bosca’s sentiments reflect BCG’s recent rally-cry for businesses to look beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Total Societal Impact (TSI) as a driver of corporate strategy; or, the aggregate of a company’s economic, social, and environmental impacts.

And there’s a bottom line argument behind the appeal. Whereas CSR initiatives see societal impact and shareholder returns as separate pursuits, TSI as a core strategy creates a virtuous circle in enhancing corporate longevity, in turn driving shareholder value and then increasing societal impact. According to BCG analysis, there is a clear correlation between ESG performance and profitability.  

For BCG’s part, the firm has long been involved in small and large-scale social projects, such as through its ongoing global partnership with Save the Children established in 2006, working last year with the World Wildlife Fund on a consumer blockchain solution for tracking the seafood supply chain, and partnering with the UN’s World Food Program to implement aid initiatives for displaced refugees in Jordan.

For its third local Community Service Day, BCG partnered with a wide range of organisations covering among other areas the education sector, healthcare, environmental sustainability and animal welfare, including, in addition to the aforementioned, the Al Noor Training Centre for Persons with Disabilities, Dubai Center for Special Needs, Thuker Social Club, and the Al Jalila Children’s Speciality Hospital.

“Unequal access to resources, opportunities, and outcomes are a major source of global instability. It is the problem of our time, and that is why at BCG we have made a major institutional commitment to social impact and in giving back to the community,” said BCG Middle East Senior Partner & Managing Director Joerg Hildebrandt of the firm’s inaugural community services day in 2017.