The poisoned pill: make money or save lives?

In an interesting article Mallen consider the huge CSR challenge that pharmaceutical companies face in Africa against the background of the Aids epidemic. Make money or save lives?

How to combine patient relief and profit-driven business practices in a context of poor countries with weak health infrastructures?

There has already been gone a lot of action and thinking into this. Just consider the two what the MSF campaign Access to Essential Medicines has done and said with respect to that.


Focusing and advocating for exclusively on more research for rare diseases the DNDi website - the Drugs for neglected diseases initiatives - is worht a visit.

It is obvious that there is need for more debate, thinking and committement to progress towards a better way to deal with this huge challenge. I am quite sure that this issue will push CSR even more on the agenda of top-management and develop the thinking and practises of CSR - at least within the pharmaceutical industry. Next opportunity for this, will be in september at the international expert conference in Basel: "Access to Life-Saving Medication". The conference is organized by the Basel Institute on Governance.

No time for CSR

Businesses are owned by their shareholders - any money they spend on so-called social responsibility is effectively theft from those shareholders who can, after all, decide for themselves if they want to give to charity.

On of the arguments against Corporate Social Responsiblilty on Mallenbaker.net

The site proposes to think about the arguments in order to find the best responses. Definitely a good exercise. The central error in the above argument is, that investing in CSR is not simply giving money away to charity. Managing an enterprise is managing relationships with multiple stakeholders, relationships that can strongly influence - on the long-term - the "licence to operate". These relationships can be expressed under the concept of reputation. For instance, consider the case of Coca-Cola, where its "Reputation"- the market-capitalization - exceeds by far the "property value" of the Company. In particular, in case of Coca-Cola, where about 96% of its value is made of intangibles, the argument goes on.

Read other arguments.