Corporate social responsibility needs to be generational to create true impact

The greatest test we face in corporate philanthropy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the ability to do things sustainably and at scale. Sustainably because (sadly) the many one-off donations we see are most likely NOT going to create any real impact. At scale because we cannot for one moment turn a blind eye to the immense needs that all require support across our country.

This is the problem with short-term CSR – it plays to audiences as opposed to beneficiaries. I am not saying everyone falls into this trap, but the dominant approach to corporate giving operates in a tight “visibility is our value” construct that is, by its very nature, short-term in design, geared to follow trends rather than needs, and disconnected from any systemic long-term goal.

The unintended consequence is that this “play to the optics” approach effectively creates dependency, not capacity. It lacks the much-needed long-term traceability required to understand where impact is most beneficial.

It’s the ultimate game of extreme corporate chess. Being visible so that you bring your stakeholders with you, but not chasing visibility as your end game because it will undermine your impact.

CSR (which is often positioned as the “soft stuff”) is in fact the most direct connection between companies like Ford, its consumers and those who live and work around us. It is the way we’re able to influence positive social shifts and contribute to nation-building, all while balancing the most fundamental of corporate truths: the competing demands of economic survival and social impact. The truth is that the “soft stuff” is very much the “hard stuff”.

While we at Ford make significant contributions to the fiscus through direct tax contributions, VAT and foreign currency inflows that drive balance of payments, it is in the “soft stuff” that we affect how people truly feel about us. Literally, it is a case of when you can see the results of our efforts for yourself, these results are more meaningful. It is one thing to say Ford represents 1% of South African GDP, and another to talk about the impact on the more than 30,000 pupils to date who have benefited from our interventions just in a programme like Rally to Read.

But, like all good chess games, you can’t arrive on the day to see “how things will play out” while relying on luck and hope as strategies to win. The reality is that corporates like us must face off against the triple challenges of available people, time and money in a way that shapes meaningful shared prosperity. It is the most extreme of tensions: do more with less, when there is only ever more to do and less to do it with.

And this can feel relentless.

It is also why generational impact is a non-negotiable focus for the work we do as Ford with and for South Africa. Projects like Rally to Read (with the Read Educational Trust) are now 28 years in the making. In this time, we have impacted schools in poorer communities with the most fundamental of interventions around simply falling in love with literacy. Since 2019 alone we have delivered more than 35,000 books to 32 identified schools in Mpumalanga, the Eastern Cape and Gauteng.

Critically this also reaches more than 550 teachers and 14 assistant teachers in connecting reading, educational materials that accompany these books and applying these to the national curriculum. This programme employs these teaching assistants to create capacity in the educational structure of these schools and their teachers and pupils.

At its core, Rally to Read targets early childhood development (ECD) and foundation-phase literacy (in grades R to 3), recognising that reading proficiency in the early years of school is the single-greatest predictor of long-term academic success, economic participation and generational poverty reduction.

While the Department of Basic Education currently emphasises the critical period from birth to five years, broader policy definitions often span from birth to nine years to align with the foundational years of schooling. This programme extends this reach to also include intermediate-stage pupils in grades 4 to 7.

And it is in the longevity that we see the value.

We have been invested in South Africa for more than 100 years, and we know deeply that this is just the start of our commitment to this market, as we seek to directly counter the challenges of capital flight and deindustrialisation.

This is the most profound argument for longevity, quite literally from ECD to working actively in the economy. Children who benefited from Rally to Read in its early years are now parents themselves. A child who learnt to love reading in a Ford-supported school then, is an adult today. If this programme shaped their relationship with literacy, they are statistically more likely to read to their own children.

The magic is that this sustained intervention with Rally to Read has truly crossed a generational threshold. It is an extraordinarily rare moment in the “soft” CSR space and represents a level of impact that no spreadsheet will fully capture. It begs the question of how we measure this for the long term. Questions like “how do you quantify the number of university graduates who were once beneficiaries of this programme when they were six or seven years old?” Equally, how do you quantify the increase in the number of qualified engineers (or even technically qualified vocations) entering the formal economy because they were set up to be successful at school and then at university? This is our next body of work as we work with the Read Educational Trust to connect the last mile.

This is not incidental longevity; it is a deliberate effort to focus on systemic influence with long-term societal outcomes. Developmental economists and education researchers broadly agree that the most cost-effective educational interventions occur in the first 1,000 days of life and during the foundation phase. Interventions at these stages have been shown to produce higher secondary school completion rates, greater tertiary participation, higher lifetime earnings, lower rates of criminal involvement and real influence in lifting poorer communities out of the poverty cycle.

The most prominent and rigorously credentialled developmental economist to cite in this context is Professor James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in economics. Heckman’s body of work is arguably the most empirically robust case yet made for early childhood intervention as an economic and social investment strategy. His research is directly applicable to the Rally to Read argument for sustained generational commitment over time. While his research was conducted in the US, South African researchers at bodies like the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town have produced complementary local evidence, which builds on his original findings.

Rally to Read operates precisely in this space. Through this long-term partnership, Ford is intervening at the moment of maximum neurological influence and maximum return on educational investment. When you do this consistently over decades you are not running a programme, you are running a generational correction mechanism; one that is urgently needed in our country.

And so, we return to where we began, to the tension between sustainability and scale, between visibility and value, between doing enough and knowing there is always more to do. The answer to that tension is not found in the size of a cheque or the reach of a press release. It is found in the quiet, unglamorous, deeply necessary work of showing up, year after year, school after school and child after child – all with the conviction that what we do today will outlast the reporting cycle, outlast the financial year and outlast us.

Rally to Read is not Ford’s programme. It belongs to the teachers who were trained by it, the children who were shaped by it and the parents (themselves once six-year-olds holding their first book) who are now passing that love of reading on to the next generation.

That is the only metric that has ever truly mattered. Not what we gave, but what remained when we were no longer in the room. For Ford, after more than a century in South Africa and 28 years of Rally to Read, we have learnt that the most powerful thing a company can do is not to be seen doing good, but to do good so consistently, so deliberately and so humbly that the community no longer needs to be told about the impact. They simply live it. DM

Neale Hill is president of Ford Africa.