Geneva School of Economics and Management Geneva School of Economics and Management

In June 2023, Chris Fabian, a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Giga (UNICEF) and his colead from the ITU, Alex Wong, announced a new strategic move to establish the organisation’s managerial headquarters in Geneva and locate its tech headquarters in Barcelona, a major development for the joint initiative between the two UN agencies. With a goal to connect every child in the world to the internet, since 2019 Giga had mapped the location of over 2 million schools on its open-source platform using geospatial satellite mapping. It had been deployed in more than 30 countries, bringing over 2.1 million children and young people online. Even so, in 2023 over 2.6 billion people worldwide (many of them children) remained offline. Within the next three months Chris and Alex had to develop a strategy to integrate the two headquarters, reconcile the maverick structure with the UN’s bureaucratic procedures, and leverage the ecosystem in Geneva for optimal global and local impact. They needed to show that a start-up born out of the UN really could change the world.

Cobalt is a critical mineral for the energy transition, yet human rights abuses in cobalt mining are rampant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where over two thirds of the world’s cobalt is produced. Human rights risks are particularly high in artisanal small-scale mining (ASM), where mining accidents and child labor are common. Companies in need of cobalt must address these issues which constitute an industry challenge that affects their supply chain. The case study outlines a practical way forward – the formalization of artisanal mining — that companies should support. Establishing this formalization model could benefit an estimated 40 million artisanal miners around the world. The case invites students to discuss the challenges of formalizing ASM in mineral and metal supply chains in the context of an energy transition that should not only be green but also just.

This case study analyzes a transformational business model for sourcing natural rubber, developed by the French sneaker company Veja. Founded in 2004, the company set out to produce the most sustainable sneakers possible. Their shoes are designed in Paris, but all production is concentrated in Brazil. To be able to source rubber sustainably in Brazil, the company helped revive a traditional wild rubber supply chain in the Amazon. To ensure the sustainability of their operations, Veja tied the payment of premiums to the condition that rubber producers do not advance deforestation. With the premium payments, wild rubber production has become an attractive source of income for local communities. The case assesses if Veja’s rubber sourcing model economically empowers local communities and enables them to protect their own habitat. The case also discusses if the approach could be scaled and serve as a model for an effective corporate contribution to address deforestation in the Amazon.

In this caselet, researchers argue that companies that require cobalt cannot turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses in artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where over 70% of the world’s cobalt is produced. The authors emphasize that all companies in the cobalt supply chain must address these issues, regardless of whether they officially purchase artisanally mined cobalt or not.

In September 2020, Pradeep Kakkattil was facing difficult questions about his team’s strategic direction. In the two years since he had founded the Office of Innovation at UNAIDS – the United Nations agency for coordinating global action on AIDS – the team had grown from two people to six and had established over 100 partnerships globally. With a dual goal to make UNAIDS more innovative and drive innovation in healthcare worldwide, their flagship initiative, the Health Innovation Exchange platform, had brought together innovators, investors/donors and government partners to support innovation in healthcare. Yet Pradeep, as director, felt they had failed to overhaul UNAIDS internal culture and processes, prompting him to to question the existing strategy and structure of an innovation unit within such a bureaucratic organization. UNAIDS was itself undergoing strategic changes aimed at decentralizing operations and focusing on gender issues. How would his team fit into the restructured organization, and if it could not, what were their options?

This case illustrates the first years of the Adecco Group Foundation (AGF), its challenges, and strategic pathways. The AGF was established in 2017 as the legally independent philanthropic arm of the Adecco Group - the biggest HR services company in the world and a Fortune 500 Company. The story follows Cynthia Hansen, Managing Director of the Foundation, as she questions the Foundation's growth strategy after three years of operation. The case shows the antecedents of the Foundation's creation and the key decisions that were taken to ensure the success of this venture. CEO for One Month, Win4Youth, and the Athlete Programmes were three social projects within the Group, coined as the legacy programs. Each was created with different goals, for clearly distinct beneficiaries, and under different departments and country offices. However, the three were significantly successful and had also become programs at a global level. After the successful relocation of the legacy programs, the Group continued to shift over additional initiatives for the Foundation to incubate. From the three programs they managed in 2017, after three years there were nine in total. The Foundation was being used as a unit to house all social projects that the Group started developing but couldn't continue nurturing. All of these had the HR industry as the common denominator, but they required very different skills and knowledge, operated in unrelated fields, engaged with unique partners and beneficiaries, and demanded international coordination within the Adecco Group. The portfolio diversification was creating operational tensions. As COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Cynthia led a deep revision of all programs, their organizational structure within the Foundation, and the impact created. This raised concerns about the dilution of the Foundation's purpose, with diversification and complex stakeholder management as the main catalysts. Therefore, Cynthia started to look for ways to improve the current strategy by focusing their social impact in more specific areas, letting some programs go, returning them to the Group, or dropping them completely.

The case follows the intrapreneurial journey of Dave Behrends, head of Trading and Managing Partner at SUCAFINA, who founded and launched farmer connect, a blockchain-based end-to-end transparent solution for the coffee trading industry. It highlights how technology can be a force for good.

This teaching case study focuses on Decathlon, Europe’s biggest outdoor and sports retailer. It examines how the company is adjusting its business model to align growth and profits with positive social impact and respect for human rights. It discusses Decathlon’s recent involvement in the nascent Ethiopian garment industry and the company’s efforts to introduce a partnership model, which is based on longer-term business relationships and joint growth strategies with selected suppliers. Beyond Ethiopia, the partnership approach is enabling suppliers in developing countries to organize their work more effectively and helping garment workers acquire new skills and capabilities, thereby improving productivity. At the same time, manufacturers receive support from Decathlon to improve general working conditions and, over time, to increase workers’ wages.

This case study chronicles Levi Strauss's and BSR's implementation of the HERproject (ie Health Enables Returns) - a program to empower low-income women working in global supply chains. In 2015, the HERproject collaborated with more than 40 partner companies, including Levi Strauss and the Levi Strauss Foundation, and experimented with new ways to increase its economic and social impact. By accompanying Elissa Goldenberg, Manager for Partnership Development and Research at BSR, the case starts with depicting the challenges in global supply chains, especially in the garment industry. It then chronicles Elissa's experience with this program and reviews a pilot implementation the HERhealth training program in one of Levi Strauss's factories in Egypt. Based on the successful program pilots such as in Egypt, Levi's decided to implement a first nation-wide rollout of the program at all its supplier factories in India. Using this scale-up as an example, the case introduces the partners' lessons learned of this boundary-spanning corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, including the success factors and challenges encountered during implementation - both at the factory level and management levels, as well as in the cross-sector partnership context. Overall, this is one of the rare case studies that explicitly links CSR initiatives and change management, thereby acknowledging the challenges at different implementation levels (eg, from pilot to rollout, at the factory, multinational company (MNC), facilitating NGO, and industry levels), and by taking into account the need for increased collaboration.

This case illustrates the inspiring journey of Grow Africa – a platform created in 2012 to promote African agriculture development partnerships. African-owned, country-led, and market-based, Grow Africa aims to accelerate investments through public-private partnerships and to unlock smallholder famers’ potential. In 2014, it involved companies such as Unilever, Heineken, Cargill, and SwissRe, and spurred many new development initiatives. One of these initiatives is the Nigerian Growth Enhancement Support scheme to overcome corruption in the fertilizer and seed distribution channels through the use of mobile phone technologies. The case can be used to discuss systemic, large scale approaches of linking firms, investment, and development – an approach that is based on collaboration and coordination between public, private, and civil society actors for sustainable market-based solutions. Specifically, it describes the challenges in African agriculture, the development opportunities that foreign and local companies may provide, the need for a multi-stakeholder platform, and the role of the World Economic Forum as a broker in creating, developing, and implementing the platform. Arne Cartridge, Director of Grow Africa, and his team sought to align the different stakeholders’ self-interests through repeated meetings and succeeded in creating a shared vision. The case closes by indicating the challenges ahead.

This case illustrates the challenging and inspiring journey of Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin and her team to realize her dream of establishing a transparent and efficient commodity exchange in Ethiopia. To address the country’s market failures that had contributed to devastating famine and the miserable position of smallholder farmers, they developed an integrative approach based on a public-private partnership. Their tasks included overcoming initial mistrust and providing market institutions to grade quality and set standard, to warehouse and issue warehouse receipts, relay market information to all the relevant actors, coordinate trading, as well as to ensure reliable payment, delivery, and contract enforcement.

The case illustrates the challenging but successful journey of a cross-sector partnership that deploys pro bono resources from Agility, AP Moller Maersk, TNT Express and UPS to support the disaster response operations of the UN Logistics Cluster. To transform an initially abstract idea into an operating partnership, the partners invested in developing and maintaining sound relationships backed by core principles, standard operating procedures and a sophisticated training programme. Additionally, the partnership required active management at the corporate level. Building on a track record of successful deployments by the end of 2011, the partners have to decide how to scale up their impact. The case lays a foundation for the discussion of the formation and management of multi-company, cross-sector partnerships. Teaching topics include the drivers of such a partnership, key success factors and specific problems, managing engagement in such a partnership at an organizational level, and the challenge of scaling up its impact.

Agility has deployed its logistics expertise and capacities in over 20 disaster relief operations. During the last four years, the corporate CSR team has set up and constantly adapted Agility's disaster relief program. It is based on three main pillars: (1) improving Agility's capacities for the Humanitarian & Emergency Logistics Program and creating internal support structures, (2) fostering bilateral partnerships with humanitarian organizations, and (3) reinforcing collaboration with the Logistics Emergency Teams. Catching up with the latest relief operation, Frank Clary, Senior Manager for Corporate Social Responsibility, reflects on the company's learning journey. This case lays the foundation for a discussion of corporate disaster relief operations and their embeddedness in a broader corporate social responsibility strategy. Teaching topics can include: structuring CSR activities and integrating a disaster relief program into a broader CSR strategy, the role of a corporate CSR team in supporting a disaster relief program, managing bilateral cross-sector partnerships and multi-company, integrative partnerships, as well as analyzing CSR-related learning processes.

In response to the Gaza crisis in 2008/9, the global logistics company Aramex decided to use its core competencies for a humanitarian relief campaign and deliver donated items to people in need. Consequently, Aramex had to quickly develop a suitable communication strategy to call for donations, select collection points, clear the goods, pack them in Aramex's warehouses, and, finally, for how to send them to Gaza. To ensure that the donations reached their destination, Aramex partnered with the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization (JHCO) in Jordan and the Red Crescent in the United Arab Emirates. The case discusses lessons learnt with regard to coordinating business and social activities, managing volunteer work, working with corporate and charity partners, and using social media to leverage the campaign.

Throughout the world civil societies have called on businesses to become involved in corporate social responsibility and engage in multi-stakeholder partnerships with identified community institutions in need of their help. In keeping with this objective, Madrasati, a Jordanian Initiative founded by Her Majesty, Queen Rania Al Abdullah, leverages the public, civil society and particularly the private sectors' resources to develop a shared responsibility for education. In one of their partnerships, Madrasati collaborated with the Central Trade & Auto Co. Toyota as private sponsor and other major stakeholders to improve the Husban Secondary School for Boys. In line with Madrasati's strategy, the school's basic infrastructure would be fixed first, after which the learning environment would be improved. For example, more interactive and technology-based teaching mechanisms were fostered together with the Jordan Education Initiative - another partner organization. Finally, to sustain the partnership efforts, the partners would engender a sense of responsibility in the school's stakeholders. Due to a general strong commitment and involvement, the partnership at the Husban School slowly approached its ultimate goals. After a visit by the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders, Nadim Haddad, the Toyota business partner, was inspired to reflect on the partnership's progress and to deduce lessons learned.