A new report by FSG on Extracting with Purpose – Creating Shared Value in the Oil and Gas and Mining Sectors sheds new light on the rising costs of value lost from weak social and environmental performance in the oil, gas and mining industry and suggests a way forward for creating shared value in the sector. Drawing on case studies from Anglo American, AngloGold Ashanti, BHP Billiton and Chevron, the report highlights how companies in the oil and gas and mining fields can create shared value by pursuing opportunities that tie business success to the prosperity of host communities and countries, often working in collaboration with governments, multilateral institutions, nonprofit organizations, and even competitors.
Measuring the full costs and benefits of shared value appears as one of the main challenges to embedding such initiatives within business DNA and scaling up good practice. The approach also resonates with broader ongoing debates regarding the need for a data revolution to measure and manage social progress beyond 2015. A recent conference organized by the Rockefeller Foundation on the future of monitoring, evaluation and technology in development underscored the risks individual privacy and safety and the need to avoid a “soylent green data revolution“that treats individuals as raw materials. The development of a data manifesto articulating 12 principles for a human-centered approach and calls for a rights based revolution show the growing awareness and debates around individual data ownership, collection and management in a tech enabled world.
The application of the platform we built for community feedback to mining companies in Peru (yes we are!) -which we presented at the conference- helps collect data on sensitive social, environmental and human rights impact through an opt-in and anonymous process. Feel free to test our platform by texting +1-647-496-5504 if you are in the U.S. or Canada.
Yet we recognize we are just beginning our journey to build safe and sustainable systems to collect “honest data” on business and human rights actual performance in real time as well as disaggregated data to understand gender, age and other inequalities in social progress. We are partnering with Innovations for Poverty Action and New York University to develop a rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of a mobile-based grievance mechanism to reduce levels of conflicts and strengthen trust between companies and communities. We look forward to updating you on how this unfolds over the next year.
We also actively participated in Feast Conference and the Annual General Meeting of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development. The practical feedback we got from a variety of stakeholders will help us as we continue to develop our platform and hone our methodology.
Last but least we encourage you to take a look at the 1st issue of the Natural Resources and the Community Review– which is on open access. Ulula has contributed a couple pieces to that installment.
We are also partnering with Thamani to propose a mobile-based community consultation system in Kenya as part of the Grand Innovation Competition 2015 organized by Making All Voices Count. You can learn more about the projecthere. Please support Jamii na Madini- Mining Rules of Engagement to help us turn this into a reality.
This letter gathers a series of blogs on harvesting data for shared value, community engagement in post-conflict settings and the results form a survey on technology for stakeholder engagement.