Social Impact: Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe on Sustainable Business Practices

PITY PARTY OVER

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe serves as the Vice President of the PlungeSmile Foundation, which provides education, health, nutrition, and infrastructure programs to support rural communities in Nigeria, Africa.

PlungeSmile exemplifies how corporations can forge impactful partnerships to tackle pressing societal challenges. Our conversation explores how authentic corporate social responsibility drives sustained business success and why it should be central to every company's mission.

Corporations elevate their brand reputation through these collaborations and showcase a solid dedication to social causes. Additionally, these alliances offer valuable insights into pressing societal issues, empowering companies to gather data for refining future product development or service enhancements.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

#AndyEberechukwuAkukwe #PlungeSmile #RelianceInfosystems #CorporateSocialResponsibility #Sustainability #SocialImpact #Leadership #CommunityDevelopment #PityPartyOver #Alygn #Stephen Matini

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: What I love about your background is the fact that you are a business person, you are an entrepreneur, but at the same time, you also have a tremendous sensitivity for sustainability and sustainable development. So how did this come about? You know, how did you join these two things?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Okay, splendid. Plunge Smile is a foundation established by the group managing director of Reliance Info Systems, Olayemi Popoola, who I happen to be a member of his team.

And then over the years, he's personalized to help to assist people, develop even on a career level as well. He took this out to the public to salvage the problem that we have in the Nigerian society, which was mainly centered on education.

Marrying his passion was not a thing of difficulty for him. And then getting members of like mind onto the team was not much of a hard work as well.

I love social impact. I love to see people smile. So joining the team of Plunge Smile and see that it's all about making this social impact is our dreams actually or fully attained, gives me that confidence to move with the team. So it's a seamless flow because it's a mixture of career and passion.

Stephen Matini: I’ve had the pleasure of talking to other business people in Africa. And one thing that all of you have in common is your sensitivity towards corporate social responsibility. And CSR is a huge topic in the Western world. But then oftentimes the need for profits, you know, to make money seems to get ahead. Why do you think in Africa this theme seems to be so important to a lot of people?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: The African society is built for interdependence. When you talk of the traditional family system, we majorly operate an extended family system here unlike what you have in Europe.

So here, when you are concerned with your spouse and your children, you still need to think about your uncles, your aunts, their families, your in-laws and all whatnot. These actually traditionally make up for the unique African family system. Corporate social responsibility is a huge thing here in that in a local community, you would always find people who are not as privileged as others.

You would always find people who actually need a helping hand. So it's such a big one because we call it giving back, right? It's such a big one that many business founders and of course giants in different fields, including sports, where actually people who depended on others to survive, people who depended on others to rise. So some survived on the streets, some survived through certain tissue-free schemes, scholarships and all that.

So the first thing anyone wants to do when they succeed is to think of how to give back to the society. And so that's why CSR is a big thing for us here, tying it to our traditional family system.

Stephen Matini: When did you hear about CSR for the first time? Do you remember?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Oh, yes. That was when I had my first corporate job in the early 2000s. I joined Diageo at the time. It was a big thing. And of course, for many other corporates all over the world, CSR is high because you want to give back to your host community. You want to give back to those that actually form your mass markets.

Stephen Matini: In the Western world, oftentimes a big debate is about, should I manage my business for shareholders? Should I manage my business for stakeholders? Oftentimes, CEOs, they really focus on short-term returns rather than long-term investments. In your opinion, how can we find balance between making sure that a business is profitable, but having a long-term goal?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: So business deals with numbers, right? It all comes to approach. So there has to be the quick approach of making money, carrying out your research, finding out what it is that the market needs, curating products or services that the market needs, curating your routes to market, positioning your brand, activating all your strategies and tactics in the marketplace to be at the winning edge.

All of these, of course, make sure that revenue, profits, and of course, growth structures almost immediately attained. But then again, likening these to the UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals ), which talks about sustainability, you don't just want to build for today. The shareholders primarily wait for, say, half a year, end of the year to take some shares, those who would sell off, those who will liquidate and all that, they do that.

But of course, the stakeholders are beautiful tomorrow because many of these employees would want to work for decades, for perennial years. So they want to see that the business succeeds. So it's just an approach knowing that, okay, we need to get the numbers. And then we have to develop a culture, a sustainability culture building on the long term, where we are not just looking at numbers, we are looking at goodwill in the market. And you can't all but attend this with marketing, selling campaigns.

This is where CSR comes, because when the people are on your side, you have good will with them, then in fact, your stay in that market is almost all even guaranteed.

Stephen Matini: Do you think that this approach can be applied to any industry, to any company?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Definitely, yes. So it depends on what the vision is, what the mission is. Of course, the vision is that big picture, and then the mission are those tiny pieces that actually lead us to the big picture.

How we are going to achieve or how any organization would achieve this would be fundamentally assembling the right team. And so this is where HR professionals come to play. For instance, in Reliance Group here, we've got a robust HR professionals or HR team made up of professionals who actually bring a whole lot of experienced wealth into their field. So what that would mean is you have to make sure that the team are of like mind with you.

So if I am the CEO, I am the founder and I have these long-term goals, I need to make sure that I get the right people by my side. Of course, over the years, there will be churn, right? There will be staff churn and all that. But those who share the same vision with you will remain. And then you build something with them, you know, progressively and make sure that they are rewarded and that they keep staying with you.

Stephen Matini: So Andy, me personally, I agree with you 100%. So everything you say resonates very deeply with me and what is dear to me. But let's say hypothetically, I were someone who said, Andy, that's beautiful, but that's not applicable. That's not realistic because you have to make sure that your company runs and to make your shareholders happy. So I don't think what you're saying is possible. How would you respond to the type of criticism?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Irrespective of the size of the corporate, that's why you have Plunge Smile. That's why we are here. So there are B2B partnerships that you can enter into with NGOs, Punge Smile referentially here. While you're doing your business, you could make financial contributions. You could have employee volunteering. You could do pro bono services.

You could actually do some skill-based volunteering where you identify certain people who bring certain skills to play, for instance, you identify people who could actually help these schoolchildren with, say, coding and then free coding services or free coding aptitude is actually a provision to them. There could be cause marketing or advocacy and public influence where you use your marketing campaigns, you highlight social mis-norms, crime for advocating actually for social reforms, for policy reforms and all that.

You could actually partner with Plunge Smile in the area of supply chain integration. So let's assume that yes, you want to deliver on education or you want to deliver on free school feeding or you want to deliver on certain piece of your corporate social responsibility. So we have the leg, we have the guys on the field, we have all the mercenaries and tools. So when we integrate our supply chain, we get to deliver this.

Then of course, impact investing is that tranche where, for instance, you are trying to say cure a water challenge in a society. And at the same time, that company actually sells water. So while solving for water problem, you are still positioning your brand as maybe the supreme or superior brand over others.

So these are more even research and data sharing as well. So how do people actually gain insights into what could be called real time societal problems that they could solve for?

That's when they actually partner with NGOs, when they partner with serious NGOs like Plunge Smile, get on the field, see what these schoolchildren are going through, see what community residents are going through, and then of course, begin to solve them. And they have rich data to form whatever product or whatever service that they want to create in the future. It's a win-win.

You can't just say, I'm here to do business and I want to look out a corporate social responsibility. And that's why we are seeing here at Plunge Smile. As an individual, you can go about your daily activities where we help you run this other aspect of your corporate social responsibility.

We have dashboards that gives you real time visibility into your donations, your resources, where they are going, how they be used, what impact they've made. And of course, you can celebrate your success, even on your website, on your page, and all that. So I see it as a collaborative effort where you just get to identify who you're going to collaborate with, then focus more on your business while we focus more on your social impact.

Stephen Matini: I love that. It's such a systemic collaborative view of the world and what the world could be, you know, in the future. Of all possible directions, what attracted you to Plunge Smile, why you decided to join this initiative?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: At a time that age, I presented my school in a quiz competition. I got to state level. In fact, I was in certain quiz competitions even at national level. So I found out firsthand that certain people would actually want to fly, but they don't have means to fly. Certain children were deprived of the rights to education because of poverty, of low appreciation of the impact of education by their parents or any other factor. It could be peer pressure, it could be violence in the community, whatever it is.

So collectively seeing that the world could actually be a better place, even especially the less privileged children get access to college education, have the right funding, have the right tools. And Plunge Smile is already playing in this space over the years. Why not? So you could see that the marriage is something that came seamlessly and effortlessly.

Stephen Matini: Where do you hope a Plunge Smile to be let's say 10 years from now, what do you see?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Before I answer that question, I want to give it a two-leg approach. So Plunge Smile actually have a flagship initiative called Educa. And this Educa was better as a result of our years of interventions in educational sector of Nigeria.

And our plan is actually to scale this across to Africa. So Educa gets to see that children who don't have school fees to pay are being funded. Children whose school buildings are dilapidated. These buildings could be repaired. Children who stay out of school because of hunger, they could be fed in school. And then most importantly, many children who stay out of school because they don't have uniforms.

They don't have the screen. They don't have bags. They don't have shoes. Neither do they have the full skill kits, right? So they stay out of school. And what we found in interventions is we saw it at 5% response increments in the attendance of schoolchildren when you kick them up. And that's why the scent of education is kid up a child. So we have “Kit Up A Child” program.

So Kit Up A Child program actually highlights making sure that the child goes back to school and stays in school, having the full kits, which are the uniforms, the bags, the shoes or sandals, as the case may be. And then of course, there are different ways by which any organization or individual can actually key into the program of London, which is educated. So you could donate, you could volunteer your skills, you could sponsor a child with an amount, you could sponsor 50 children, you could sponsor 100 children.

So those details we could actually share with you, it depends on the school, depends on the popularity of what you want to do. And then you could partner with us on a long term, you know, a while ago we talked about partnership and the different trends of partnership. Partnership goes to see that these solutions are scaled. And of course, there's a long-term retention in our schemes. So we actually have people that we work with along these trenches. So educate proper, what's the workings of educator?

So in Educa, we build, we have rather interactive maps, we have dashboards, all the APIs, and of course, the user-friendly experience that anyone would have on the app. So here you explore the map, you choose a school, you select a project. I've mentioned a whole lot of projects. You select a project, then of course, you donate towards this project. You track the progress through the dashboard, you have real-time tracking of the project. And then, of course, you celebrate success. You celebrate impact made.

We help you do this on social media. We collaborate with you. There are badges. There are so many other things that we've come up with to actually help you touch like this, because we are not doing this in our name. So we are doing this in the name of the corporates, but because we have the experience, we have the wherewithal, we know what the problems are. And we have over 112,000 public primary schools in Nigeria already in the system. So we could actually help you navigate. It could be your alma mater, it could be any school that you know that actually has a problem.

And with this, your go-to social impact is made easy and you achieve your dreams. So where I see Plunge Smile in the next few years is scaling across, you know, out of Nigeria, you know, scaling across Africa, because the plan to actually do this is already in place. And I see 2024 being that year, where all of these will begin to unfold. And so that's why we actually need collaborators, we need individuals, we need corporates and all.

We have, of course, Plunge Smile is riding on the back of a technological giant, which is Reliance Ecosystems Group. So all the tech driven solutions, all the tech enablements, all the functionalities that will actually help you have visibility into your project and actually make sure you know there is accountability there. So on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, depending on how we agree or however you want to do it, we could actually have some reviews. We could actually have some performance reviews. We could actually celebrate your donations, whatever resources you would see them live. And if there are leftovers, of course, they will be reimbursed.

Stephen Matini: Has education always been central in your life?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Oh, yes. A man informed will make informed decisions, while a man uninformed will make deformed decisions. So he could think that he's smart. He could think that, oh, I've met the market women. I've met the market people. I know the pain points. But he doesn't know what we call research.

He doesn't know what we call inferential analysis, right? So if he cannot actually do that, then his decisions will always be deformed. So education is central to anyone's life. And that is why through the Educa Initiative of Plunge Smile, we are drumming on education. We are asking individuals, we're asking corporates, come join us in what we've done over the years. We have a whole lot of achievements.

We've donated thousands of textbooks and notebooks. We have school teachers in some committees that we hired. And under bureau, we have buildings renovated. We have several schools where children don't bother about what to eat. They just come to school. There's always a free school feeding. Even in a unit like this, a Plunge Smile still goes out to communities, you know, share some staples, some foods, materials, and even some drugs to make sure that, you know, residents are safe, they are healthy, and of course, they are welfare.

So over the years, and of course talking about technology, we have an ICT center where children actually just come. There are laptops, there are gadgets, they just come to up their skills in computer proficiency. There are several programs for them to do across fields. They get to see the outer world. They get to understand Internet, cloud computing, coding, graphics design, data analysis, at least at that basic level. And all of these will form their mindsets to say, you know what?

I have to continue this. I have to get to the top. It's just beyond what I'm taught in English mathematics and some other general science subjects. So yes, it's central to everyone and it's central to me.

Stephen Matini: You know, these days, a lot of people feel scared and afraid what the future might hold. You know, we listen to the news and it's just this constant polarization, bickering, fighting and wars and such and such. So a lot of people feel not that optimistic about the future. How do you stay positive? You have so much strength. There's so much energy. How do you keep your energy up?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Man, who is a tripartite being, spiritual and body, has to always draw strength from God. Personally, I'm a believer of Jesus Christ. That is my key strength and how I draw energy fundamentally. Then I draw energy, of course, from happenings around.

The problems of others get to inspire me and get to make me know that I need to find solutions to their problems. 'Cause I told you I grew up seeing people with diverse problems. I had some of my challenges myself. So problem in the African society is an ending. And then keeping your head above the waters, navigating through those challenges and getting to the top, you just need to be focused because it's only through being focused that you can help others.

So one from God and then two, being inspired by helping people get out of their problems.

Stephen Matini: What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs who are interested in pursuing your similar route, a route that is filled with sustainable development?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: All right. So according to a UN, we have 17 SDGs. Three may be very much pronounced, which has to do with health and well-being, quality education, and of course, industry innovation and infrastructure. First and foremost, across the 17 divides or 17 goals, any venture need to tie their vision to the actualization of some of these goals, because trying to achieve all of these goals may be a tall order for any corporate, right? Because it's a very broad space.

So when you need to identify your key strengths, marry that with what you would want to solve in the society business wise, then of course, you have the social impact that actually inspires you from seeing people with similar problems. It could be people with nutrition problems, it could be people with shelter problems, it could be people with water problems. And then maybe you are working on any of these or a sinister solution area.

So that inspires you to even go out there to get solutions to their problems. So this could be viewed in the form of impact investing, which I said a while ago, which is where you're actually making this impact. There'll be financial returns. But in addition to financial returns, of course, there is this corporate or social impact made at the corporate level. So my advice would be, when you research, you find out what the problems are, you know what your key strengths are, you position yourself to take advantage of your key strengths and then bring the solution to the social space.

Then of course, you need partners. And being that one smile is that foundation that has been on the ground, that has actually worked in these key areas. You need to partner with an organization like Plunge Smile. So that is very, very important because you actually need a helping hand. You need one to actually serve as a compass to help you have a soft landing and then make sure that your resources or the resources you're deploying are well utilized. So this is the advice I'll give them.

Stephen Matini: Growing up, was there any person or any event that somehow contributed to help you realize who you wanted to be?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Oh, yes. Okay. So growing up, I've had challenges, right? My upbringing was settled with certain challenges.

I needed certain things and they were not readily available. And then I had to be determined as the first of four children, just calling it straight. So I lost my parents at an early age. I needed to make sure that, of course, my younger ones would actually get to where I was. So at the time, still in secondary school, there were certain luxury that were available to others that were not available to me.

And I knew one thing that the only way for me to access this luxury was actually to study. So I was a bookworm. So the only thing I knew was how to study. I never really kept friends. You wouldn't believe that the first time in my life that I played PS, that's PlayStation was actually years after marriage when I bought it for my children. So many of my mates would play those games, would indulge in so many activities, even in primary school and secondary school.

But hey, I didn't have that luxury. I just knew that the only thing that would actually get me above the waters was to study and then believing in my God. So I did this and that has been my main state.

Stephen Matini: Is there anything that you would like our listeners of our episode to focus on in particular?

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: I want to speak across life, without any industry, without any solution area in mind. So fundamentally, you need to be socially aware of who you are. You need to understand that as a man, we are not just elevated animals, we are created to solve problems.

So you need to start out early enough to find out the problems that exist and those problems that resonate with your inbuilt capacity. Now, the capacity may not be well enough. You could have 20% of what you need to solve those problems. So the one lies on you to make sure that you build for the 80% capacity while trying out solutions. So what do I mean? I can't say I want to take care of 100 households if I didn't have the resources to do that.

But I could actually start with a household while taking up courses, learning how people do it, building my business, to have the full capacity where I could even achieve beyond the 100 households.

Then two, you need to be tenacious. You need to be consistent in whatever it is that you do. Because there will always be storms, there will always be criticisms.

Even in this social impact, even as London actually delivers the social impact to communities, you see here a few people doubting, suspecting, why are they doing it? Is there anything in need for them? Is there anything hidden? They are not telling us stuff like that, right? But you need to be considered what you do and find a way to navigate through those criticisms and those challenges, because they will always be there and they should not put you down.

Then of course, finally, you need to have your eye on the ball. What is the ball as a corporate want to make X revenue? Y profits and employees get to Z countries, make T social impact. This should form your daily watch, right? So every day you get to review how close am I to achieving these call-out points? How close am I to getting to my destination?

And then whatever it is that you need to adjust, you adjust. Not forgetting that you have to study some people that have gone ahead of you. They are always models, so get to find out how they did it, how they built their businesses, how they built their social impact, how they actually built their nonprofits for a long term, how they actually delivered and they were trusted. Just as we do the Plunge Smile, we built a trust system where I'll call it a trust foundation, where as you join us as a partner, as you come in, everything is clear to you.

So we need to make sure that this is maintained because this is what actually gives everyone confidence at the end of the day. So even in an organization, your employees, your co-C level staff need to have visibility into what you do, ideas will just come up. And then, of course, achieving your dreams will be a walk in the park.

Stephen Matini Well, Andy, I feel energized after listening to you. So thank you so much for your vision, for your leadership, for your energy, for all the things that I've learned today. Because oftentimes I talk about corporate social responsibility, but you are the embodiment of concepts that sometimes are just, you know, very academic. You really live and breathe this. So thank you so much.

Andy Eberechukwu Akukwe: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Stephen. You have a lovely day.