COMPANIES may be on the lookout for positive outcomes in their growing lists of corporate social investment projects, but experts caution that a failure to evaluate the business cases of these investments — which now amount to R8bn in South Africa — will continue to leave fields of broken dreams.Companies are good at measuring their financial performance, but they are falling short when it comes to their corporate social investment (CSI) because they are not treating it like other investments."What is shocking is even among companies that provide the data, almost none provides a return on investment," says Integrated Reporting & Assurance Services (Iras) CEO Michael Rea.The outcomes of poorly crafted policies are already visible to travellers in Africa or to mining towns in South Africa. There are laptop projects in Kenya where the computers are being used as light sources in communities rather than for the purposes they were intended. The laptops are charged during the day and hung...
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