Community investment: reporting outcomes, not expenditure
The group's community programmes are now assessed on sustained outcomes twelve months after deployment.
L. Nwachukwu
Director, Sustainability & Corporate Affairs
Community investment reporting across the corporate sector has a measurement problem: expenditure is easy to count and outcomes are not, so expenditure becomes the metric and the incentive follows the metric.
The group has moved its community programmes onto an outcomes basis. Each programme is assessed twelve months after deployment against a small number of pre-registered indicators — continued operation, beneficiaries actively served, and local ownership of ongoing costs. Programmes that fail the twelve-month assessment are either restructured or discontinued rather than re-funded.
This has reduced the number of programmes we run and increased the average commitment per programme. Skills and electrification programmes have performed strongest against the sustained-outcome test; short-cycle donation programmes have performed worst and are being wound down.
The full methodology and the current programme register will be published in the group's annual sustainability disclosure.