Community Investment Strategies

Companies around the world engage in community investment (CI) efforts as a way to promote local development and benefit stakeholders in their areas of operations.  The aim of this handbook is to help IFC client companies and the wider private sector operating in emergining markets to think strategically about how they can support community investment projects that are successful, sustainable, and consistent with their business objectives. 

The Corporate Engagement Project (CEP) works to ensure that the presence of companies has a positive, rather than negative, impact on the communities with whom they work. Since 2000, over 60 international companies, mostly from the extractive industries - operating in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and North America - have participated in the Project. Insights from Corporate Engagement Project were published in May 2009 in Getting it Right: Making Corporate-Community Relations Work by Luc Zandvliet and Mary B. Anderson. CEP is part of CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Social investment (SI) programmes are defined as the voluntary contributions companies make to the communities and broader societies where they operate, with the objective of benefiting external stakeholders, typically through the transfer of skills or resources. This guidance document aims to address the question of how to create successful and sustainable community investments and how to measure their success.

This study explores how communities and companies can engage in co-planning and monitoring to ensure sustainable local development benefits from the extraction of resources. Within the context of a spectrum of participation a variety of tools and mechanisms are presented in the paper. Some of these tools have been used primarily in the public sector, however companies stand to benefit from the tools in forms that are adapted to context, as they are potential vehicles to increase transparency, and thus accountability of companies, communities and governments.

Improving the management of the social and economic impacts of significant mining and industrial operations has become an increasingly important public policy issue in recent years. It is a critical element in the sustainable development agenda. This manual provides a process designed to assist Extractive Industry operations to identify and manage their social and economic impacts (both positive and negative). It also provides guidance on how to improve overall social performance where this is necessary.

The Australian minerals industry developed Enduring Value – the Australian Minerals Industry Framework for Sustainable Development to enhance its commitment to sustainable development and to build on its Industry Code for Environmental Management, the industry’s platform for continual improvement in managing environmental issues

Breaking New Ground presents an analysis of a large and heterogeneous sector through the many stages of minerals and metals exploration, production, use, reuse, recycling, and final disposal.The project assumed from the start that sustainable development could provide a useful framework to guide the minerals sector.

Harnessing the opportunities that the mining sector can bring to community development is not an easy task, and not one that can be completed quickly. Within a limited time frame the activities of seven mining operations and two projects at the pre-operational phase were reviewed and lessons drawn from these experiences as well as from other community development and poverty reduction programmes in Guinea. Examples of good practice approaches to community development in the extractive industry in other countries have also been considered. This report and the framework presented are intended as a first step in establishing a new approach to community development and are dependent on the participation and commitment of all players.