An Agenda for Business-Humanitarian Partnerships

Humanitarians assigned to some of the most remote, inhospitable, and dangerous places on earth often find themselves in the same areas as field workers for large international corporations. Perhaps unknowingly, they share common goals.

Although their missions differ, they sometimes share the same space with poor and suffering people. Often, they also share a sense of compassion and a strong desire to help their neighbors. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, oil-rig workers helped staff of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) rescue Vietnamese boat people in the Gulf of Thailand. During the massive influx of Rwandans into Tanzania in 1994, a construction company helped UNHCR build refugee camps and access roads. In Azerbaijan, international energy companies have provided crucial support in providing shelter to hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people. Although many in the world of humanitarian work remain wary of any association with private business, these examples illustrate our common goal--meeting the needs of people. It is a shared concern we should build upon.

Stereotypes labeling big business as "lacking a social conscience" and humanitarians as "naïve do-gooders" will soon become a relic of the past. Globalization will foster new partnerships, associations, and alliances. Business and humanitarians are destined to become partners helping those in need. In doing so, they will ultimately help themselves. Businesses want prosperity, inclusiveness, and security. Insecure people make bad customers. Humanitarian agencies also wish for nothing more than a prosperous, inclusive, and secure world where people do not suffer from hunger, poverty, and violence from ethnic conflict.

Resolving refugee problems, for example, contributes to stability, which in turn opens up possibilities for economic development and ultimately prosperity. Businesses have much to gain from seeing the negative spiral of conflict, forced population movement, and poverty replaced by conflict resolution and a sustainable peace ensured through reconstruction and development. Both have a joint long-term goal to make the world a more stable place. Largely as a result of a new global compassion sparked by instantaneous communications and the information revolution, signs of a strategic alliance between businesses and humanitarians are already emerging (see pp. 164-165, "Preserving Cultural Heritage"). Images of the misery of refugees and other suffering people are beamed daily into homes around the world, stirring a desire to help. With more than 21 million refugees and others in need worldwide, humanitarians need all the help they can get.

Business support should not, however, simply be an act of charity or a convenient way to improve a company's image. Partnership with humanitarian agencies requires that companies accept responsibility and certain basic norms of ethical behavior. The purpose of business is profit, but it should not come at the expense of a broader vision of the social, political, and human context in which business operates.

Some business groups, unwittingly or not, may contribute to war and to human rights violations. They exacerbate these problems by taking profits from natural resources, by doing business with governments that violate human rights, or even by exploiting persecuted and repressed groups as cheap labor. It is well known that some of the worst conflicts in Africa have been sustained in this way.

We must seriously work together to address, to marginalize, and ultimately to stop these dangerous practices. Business, for example, can play a positive role by inducing governments to improve their own human rights standards. There is common ground on which to build. Governments, business, and humanitarians share a goal: meeting the needs of people, whether we look at them as citizens, shareholders, customers, or victims of war and persecution.

So, how can the business and humanitarian sectors work together to make this a better world? We should not simply view this relationship as one in which business gives and humanitarians receive. At UNHCR, we see it as a partnership based on common objectives.

• Financial support is particularly important. Humanitarian programs are...