Corporate Social Responsibility in the Education Sector in Rising Economies

Education is often the easiest and first of the various community development initiatives that receives support and funding from corporates, but is not necessarily the most dominant Corporate Social Responsibility investment. While the nature of CSR interventions in all economies remains similar, the sequence of investments is seen to follow a pattern across rising economies, both for local as well as transnational corporates. While all CSR has moved from philosophy to philanthropy to more modern stakeholder approaches, the requirements remain community driven. EduCSR (Education in CSR) is an understudied area with inadequate datasets, so the paper gathers key data and illustrations to connect the dots and build insights into the workings of EduCSR in rising economies. The paper identifies an EduCSR Progression Pathway for rising economies that typifies the sequence of investments in communities. This progression also raises the game for value add and impact, and the paper maps the maturity of the EduCSR sector in rising economies by identifying an EduCSR Value Chain. Combining the two, it finally creates a positioning map for economies to enable policy decisions to leapfrog to higher impact EduCSR interventions even in rising economies where CSR is yet to mature. We note that EduCSR is a bellwether investment in CSR, and plot the positioning map as a nudge tool to enable EduCSR to continue to play this role and build for higher impact interventions.