By A Correspondent

Dentsu India’s social and development sector communication division, Citizen Dentsu, in partnership with UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) India, launched CSR advisory services, to assist Corporates with their CSR planning and implementation. With this initiative, Dentsu India will be the first Ad and Communications firm to offer CSR services, along with a reputed implementation and monitoring partner, UNFPA India.

The provisions of CSR Policy, notified under the Companies Act 2013 promises to be a historic milestone, as India becomes the first country in the world to bring social responsibility to the centre stage of corporate reporting framework. The real challenge, however, for the 6000-odd corporates above a certain size, who now will be required to plan, implement and report their CSR activities annually to their stakeholders, is really coming out of a familiar domain and diving deep into a much-talked-about, but fairly unchartered CSR territory.

Citizen Dentsu, manned by a team of professionals, has years of experience in strategic communications for numerous development sector issues like child survival and safe motherhood, immunization, HIV and AIDS, education, water and sanitation and environment. Besides, Dentsu companies all over the world work on CSR initiatives for many of their global and local clients.

Emphasising the respective roles of the two partners, Rohit Ohri, Executive Chairman, Dentsu India Group and CEO, Dentsu APAC, said, “While Citizen Dentsu will work closely with clients in strategizing and planning their CSR initiatives, helping clients extract the maximum through brand-CSR synergy, which we think company heads will be greatly interested in, UNFPA will provide technical support for projects undertaken by pre-evaluated and approved set of NGOs”.

Frederika Meijer, Representative, United Nations Population Fund, India adds, “We have a range of CSR-ready projects that companies can partner on to meet their CSR commitments in India. More importantly, with UNFPA employing globally certified protocols to monitor and evaluate non-government and civil society organizations (NGOs), as well as their work, the CSR projects can be expected to be far more efficient and effective”. She believes that while there are thousands of field-level organizations ready to take up CSR projects, Citizen Dentsu’s experience with social and developmental projects in India and UNFPA’s inputs in terms of NGO selection and planning, monitoring and evaluation of projects, would be a clear and unique differentiator.

Rajendra Singh from Citizen Dentsu and Rajat Ray from UNFPA India will be steering the partnership. With both being seasoned hands in brand and corporate advertising, as well as in handling development-led projects, it is easy to understand why they have been picked for the task.