Ginza×CSR・CSV Vol.7 Ricoh

Promoting independence and improving educational environments

• ─ What is the educational environment like in rural India?
• For one, you often see kids taking lessons outside. This is because there are not enough classrooms, desks and chairs for the number of children. Other reasons are that there is no electricity so the classroom is too dark, or that there is no air conditioning so it’s too hot.
  Teachers don’t have duplicators, so for tests, they have to write out questions on the blackboard and the students write their answers in their notebooks and tear out the page to hand in. In this kind of environment, the teacher’s actual teaching time is cut down and the students cannot focus properly on learning.
• ─ So India is making efforts to get more students receiving compulsory education.
• The government of India has budgeted a hefty amount for education. It is aiming to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal to “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.”
  The government has established a law that mandates the creation of organizations called ‘school management committees’ that are similar to parent teacher associations to improve the educational environment. The problem is that these committees are not functioning, so schools do not receive their part of the budget and cannot invest in improving their educational environment.

• ─ So that is why support is needed on the human side in addition to the donation of duplicators.
• Save the Children visits the region and helps them create school management committees made up of teacher and community representatives, parent representatives and representatives from among the children. They meet periodically to hold discussions and to submit requests to the government for funding to improve the school. We have also set up children’s groups that are like student councils.
  In many homes in rural India, children are absent from school to help with farm work and girls are married young without being sent to school. To address this, we are also carrying out activities to teach the community that education is a child’s right. Going forward, we plan to move on from the “Collaboration Phase” to the “Phase of Independence.”
• ─ What is needed to move support activities into the “Phase of Independence?”
• We need to help them understand that they can manage better schools on their own. However, there are many challenges in bringing this about. For the first year after donating the duplicators, Ricoh supplies the consumables, but after that, the schools have to secure a budget for them.
  And yet, they have other priority issues and may have difficulty budgeting for duplicator supplies. To overcome this, we met with a top official of the district government’s agency to promote compulsory education this past August and had them promise that the government would allocate part of the budget to each school.

Resolving social problems and promoting corporate growth at the same time

• ─ What is “value-creating CSR” that is Ricoh’s growth strategies?
• Ricoh is striving to enhance its contribution to resolving social issues by utilizing business resources. We want our initiatives to lead to corporate growth.
  Corporate growth means that an activity does not just offer short-term benefits, but is also linked to market expansion, hints for new marketing techniques, product and device innovations, and human resources development. We want to continue both resolving social problems and promoting company growth. This is a goal we call value-creating CSR.
• ─ Was there a point in the Education Support Program in India that led to Ricoh’s growth?
• At the start of the program, we thought you could buy paper anywhere, but we found out that there were not many shops nearby where teachers could get paper. This showed us that there is a local need to get duplicators together with paper as a package. Also, rats got into some of the duplicators we donated to schools and chewed through the cables. We then added a zippered cover to provide an environment that makes it easier to use the product.
  So, we were able to obtain marketing information about what products and sales techniques are needed in the potential market of rural areas, and we plan to use this information to grow our business in the future.