Corporate Social Responsibility in Uganda: Localizing the Global Corporate Social Responsibility Agenda: Lessons from Uganda

Globally, the clocking of the year 2015 marked a significant landmark in the Global Corporate Social Responsibility (GCSR) arena. That is, landmark in policy, research, practice, scholarly and managerial aspects of CSR agenda. This year saw how the ISO 26000 [a corporate social responsibility, CSR guidance standard] had been tested for 5 years since its inception in 2010, yet the MDGs framework has ended. While the intermarriage of these two frameworks (ISO 26000, and, MDGs) provided a basis for refinement of CSR to fit in a global CSR arena as witnessed by Katamba, Nkiko, Tushabomwe-Kazooba, et al., (International Journal of Social Economics, 39, 375–390, 2016) in their works, “Community Involvement and Development: An intermarriage of ISO 26000 and Millennium Development Goals,” the current SDGs framework 2030, presents a need to re-visit the effectiveness of CSR and sustainability interventions in a localized setting, that is, at local, regional or country level. Thus, the purpose/originality of this paper/chapter is to demonstrate how global sustainable development [CSR] frameworks or standards can be localized for refinement of CSR activities. To realize this purpose, the authors have reviewed CSR publications from Uganda to identify how CSR is managed in 50 companies that have won various CSR accolades in Uganda. Then these CSR management practices were matched against internationally proclaimed CSR [sustainable development] frameworks notably ISO 26000, SDG Agenda 2030, CEO Water Mandate, and UN Global Compact in order to reveal the development impact realized after these activities are localized. The outcome was a profile of localized CSR activities of various companies. These CSR activities, thru the Adaptive Theory, have been generalized to form, ‘The Most Important CSR Issues in Uganda.’ To bring out the concept of localization, the chapter/paper proceeds to show how companies use these international framework [e.g., SDG Framework] to manage their CSR.