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w Worrld Visio
on’s Jam
mes or press releases to us at editor [at]
csrdiges
st dot com .
Quek k and Mindy
M Chhee
World Vision
V was established
e in 1950 witth a missionn to care Pages
an orphans. More than half a century later, World
for Asia W
• About th
he CSR Digest
Vision has
h embraced commun nity developpment and advocacy
a
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for the poor so tha
at children and
a their families migh
ht be able
to build
d sustainablle futures. World
W Visionn Singapore
e was Search
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shed in 1983, from its humble beg ginnings as a field
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o help the Vietnamese “Boat
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city Fuel health an
nd
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Malaysia M
workersre
eporting sustainab
bilityToll unions

(l-r) Mrr. James Que

ek & Ms. Miindy Chee
©2008-2009 DC Publicatio
ons Sdn Bhd
-X). All rights rese
(846388- erved, except whe
ere
The CSR R Digest maanaged to catch up with World Vission indicated.. Copyright of Dev
viant Art visuals
Singapoore’s Executtive Directo
or, Mr Jamess Quek. Queek has had remain wiith the authors/arrtists.
more thhan two dec cades of expperience in communica ations,
public relations
r and managem ment in Singgapore, having
worked as a seniorr journalist at The Business Timess and
serving in businesss schools in
n two of Singapore’s unniversities.
He is jo
oined in the interview with
w Ms. Min
ndy Chee, World
W
Vision Singapore’s
S External Reelations Ma
anager.
1 
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CSRD: How many corporate sponsors does World Vision have in Asia?

MC: We don’t have the exact numbers at the moment, but the majority of them are
multinationals, and a huge chunk of them, and 60 to 70 percent are from Asia as well.

CSRD: Do you work in partnership with companies in more than one country?

MC: Yes, we try to find synergy. We have a model, but we synergize it according to our
partner and to the situations. We replicate the same model, for example, in this region.

CSRD: Does partnership and sponsorship differ from region to region?

MC: It depends very much on the magnitude of the company, how wide and far they want to
spend on CSR. Also, each country wants to support their own country’s needs. For example,
Proctor & Gamble in India are supporting Indian programmes. They have a 6 year education-
based CSR programme they are running there.

CSRD: How much work your corporate partners helped in term of Mongolia?

MC: Mongolia is quite a unique, in the sense when a corporate chooses a particular country,
they must have a presence over there. A lot of companies we work with unfortunately do not
have a presence in Mongolia. But what they do help us with is they push child sponsorship
through their own employees, to pick up sponsorship as individual sponsors.
There are also ad hoc projects, what we call children in crisis. In Mongolia, there is a street
children lighthouse, which supports street children as they are given up by their family. And
knowing the situation in Mongolia, the temperatures there can reach to -40 degree, and a lot
of these children are forced to live in underground tunnels, what we call the sewage system
here. This is the warmest place they can find in the winter time. Unfortunately, the pipes in
those underground tunnels are very badly maintained, and most of the time, the pipes
explodes in the middle of the night.

A lot of kids get scalded, and in cases when infections kick in, they also die. I spoke with
one of these child protection officers in Mongolia, who said that if a child lived a week in the
streets, there is high chance, a 70-80 percent chance that he or she will get sexually
assaulted. The street children centre forms partnerships with the community as well for the
children for drop-in centre kinds of facility
2 

A young boy in a refugee camp in Southern Africa eats his rice. The food crisis in Southern
Page

Africa grows worse by the day as grain prices continue to rise

  

CSRD: Do you have business participating in these programmes?

MC: It is more of the individual sponsorship in Mongolia, not so much corporate sponsors.

CSRD: That’s a shame.

MC: Yes, but we are planning to improve this over time.

JQ: But Mongolian children are very well received. At least , in Singapore, people want to
sponsor Mongolian children.

MC: Mongolian children are very cute, they have rosy cheeks. But we do also need to
educate our sponsors because there are also other kids for sponsorship. There is a lot of
sponsorship for the cute children, but not so for the darker skin children. Sponsorship goes
beyond that border.

CSRD: Do you know what is going on with partnership in World Vision Malaysia?

MC: There two parts to World Vision, we have what we call a support office that does fund-
raising, and the other is what we call the national office, which implements development
projects. Malaysia and Singapore fall under support offices, meaning that we do fund-
raising.

But the corporate social responsibility there is growing over. But more needs to be done. In
a way, a lot of companies want to implement CSR into their business agenda, but they have
no handles or no hands or no know-how to do so, and that’s where NGOs like World Vision
will come in very nicely as their hand to do so. Malaysia is likewise in a similar position, I
would say.

CSRD: There is a downtrend in the world economy. Has there been any reduction in the
sponsorship or financing?

JQ: Thank God, so far no. But it is early days. We are in our Q1 numbers (from October to
December), so it’s still early. We have exceeded our targets, but like I said, it is still early
days. The next two or three quarters will be more telling. We are hoping for the best,
preparing for the worst, but I think our commitment to the field … the needs are always
there, economic downturn or not.

In fact, during economic downturn, the needs are greater. For example, during the recent
food crisis, when we all feel the pinch, but we ate less perhaps, but down in the field, there
are people reduced to poverty with nothing to eat. So our commitment will not diminish in
any way. We’ll do our very best.

CSRD: Who are your biggest sponsors in the region?

JQ: It’s very hard to say. P&G is our champion and one of our biggest sponsors. They speak
louder than us, speak better than us and sell us better than us. We have a very wonderful
3 

partnership because of the driver, from P&G management and our shared vision. It cascades
Page

down through the company, 2,500 of them. It is very integrated, not only on personal level
  

but also at a corporate level. Disaster relief kind of sponsorship comes at the corporate
level. On personal level, a lot of their employees are child sponsors. The other day, we got
sponsors from US, Japan and UK, and we wondered where they came from. Then we found
out they are actually from P&G, because they have a very international mix of employees.

We also have other very supportive multi-nationals, like Capital Land and Jebsen and Jessen

MC: Yes, and also Johnson and Johnson. World Vision works with very diverse portfolio
companies whether MNC or SME. We actually customise CSR, and hope to synergise what the
business objective of the company together with what World Vision does best. It’s actually a
win-win situation.

CSRD: So you work with local companies?

JQ: We just met with Tony from Flextronic (Tony Khaw, Director Operations Excellence
(Corporate Responsibility & EHS), Asia Pacific Flextronics, Singapore). He was sharing how he
was involved with us during tsunami, and he is looking for further collaboration, and other
many small companies.

MC: And the government boards as well, like the Health Promotions Board. When we ran a
HIV exhibition last year, they pumped SGD300,000.00 sponsorship for us to run the two-
month campaign. We fared well so far because we have strong support from the grassroots.
Most of our child sponsors are individuals not companies. And then when individuals in a
company becomes educated and sure of the concept of child sponsorship, they started to
talk to their friends and this is what has happened in the past, especially during last
Christmas.

CSRD: More social work organisations run more like business, and more and more business
run their affairs like charitable organisations. What are your thoughts on that?

JQ: Helping people is a business, because we need proper structure and organisation. We
have 50 years of history, we learned that you can have the people, but if you don’t have the
structure, organisation, the balls will drop. It will not be sustainable over a long period of
time. Our programmes runs for at least 10 to 15 years. We cannot run it like a family
business. So we have corporate governance, we have structure, reporting system, peer
review, there have been complaints by World Vision International that we are over-audited.
So helping the poor is hard work, but it is also a business - not business in the sense of
profit, but it needs to be run like a business - efficiently so that the poor need not suffer.

CSRD: Why should businesses choose World Vision as community partner?

JQ: One of them is trust, if people do not have trust, once it is broken, it is very hard to
continue our relationship with our donors. Over 60 years, World Vision has maintained a
very strong level of trust mainly because we have delivered our promises to the donor, as
well as to the people we help. This reservoir and well spring of trust has been there in good
times and bad times. We have noticed that. during bad times, our support base has not
diminished. In fact, it goes up. In bad times, people understand that other people need
more help.
4 
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CSRD: How
H orld Vision and other NGOs
can Wo N assistt businessess to greaterr good in thiis bad
time?

JQ: In many
m compaanies, they realise theyy do want to
o do good. In
I many ins stances, they can
do goodd in a very limited
l way because off their limite
ed resourcees. Their keyy reason to do
businesss is to mak
ke profit, an
nd they find out that to
o help the po her business, so
oor is anoth
they fou
und out thaat their reso
ources is strretched.

So the value
v that World
W Vision
n gives to thhe business, whether MNC
M or SME, is that Wo
orld
Vision is a global company.
c And if they want
w to do good
g and he
elp, they ca
an also have
e the
global reach
r that World
W Visionn has. If you
u want to doo good in Etthiopia, butt you have no
n
resourc
ces to go an nd help the community y in Ethiopia
a. But we ha
ave a presennce there.

We can enable you, facilitate and

a help yoou do that. Like
L in the case
c of P&G
G, they wantt to help
in India
a, Myanmar. And they don’t
d want to
t be distracted from their core buusiness, so they
partner with us. Soo, we help them to help p those peo
ople in India
a, Myanmar,, because th heir
employees want to o help. So th
here is perfe
ect synergy
y. My simplee answer is tthat, World Vision,
because e of our glo
obal reach, can
c help companies to have an im mpact locally
y and globaally in
area of their choicee.

CSRD: Do
D you hav
ve any advic
ce to studen
nt or young professiona
als who wan
nt to go into
o CSR?

JQ: It is
s a very mea aningful asp
piration, to not just waant to work for a living.. I have foun
nd a lot
of youn ng people arre very tune s idea of doing good while working, even amo
ed in to this ong our
staff, who
w used to work with big
b compan nies, but the
ey realise thhat there is more to liviing than
just earrning money y. These are
e people with vision an nd passion. Helping the e poor is a
busines ss, so we neeed professionals with skill and th oupled with passion an
he ability, co nd
vision. They
T are the almost peerfect comb bination. Witthout moral calibre you u can get
discourraged very easily.◊
e
5 
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