People often talk about the big companies and their support of charitable causes, disaster relief and other humaitarian projects – this article in The Guardian talks about this very topic.
The charity disparity: can corporate benevolence be free of self-interest?
For all the talk of aid dependency, Haiti is more dependent on remittances – people sending money home from abroad – than donations. While aid averaged about 12% of its annual income between 2004 and 2009, remittances from workers abroad averaged more than 22%, officially reaching almost $1.5bn in 2010 (although experts claim it is at least double that). As one friend put it, the Haitian toiling in the cloakroom of some London nightclub is more important than the World Bank.
So there is hardly a more important company for Haiti, and many other countries dependent on remittances, than Western Union. It oversees 214m personal money transactions every year, totalling approximately $76bn.
What are your thoughts on big companies and their support of charity – is it self serving, a way to please their customers and to look good in the community, or are they doing it for all the ‘right reasons’?
charitymattersnz.com 