The Case for Mutual Value

A letter to global thought leaders from Scott Johnson, Vice President – Global Environmental and Safety Actions.

Dear Friend:

In a recent mailing, we at SC Johnson shared a look into our efforts to create sustainable business partnerships and a mutually valuable business model with base of the pyramid (BoP) communities in Kenya.  In doing so, we have partnered with local youth groups who manage trash collection and recycling businesses.

The youth groups incorporate SC Johnson products, such as Baygon®, Raid®, Pledge® and Windex® within their normal portfolio of services and in doing so provide a new service to a community where pride in home is paramount. In this venture, every day brings the unforeseen, but every day also brings inspiration, especially in the story of Sammy Gitau.

The General Manager for SC Johnson Kenya, Antoine Likoud, is fortunate to call Sammy a friend. They serve on the Board of Trustees of Carolina for Kibera (CFK), an international NGO based in Kibera within Nairobi, Kenya. This organization uses sports to promote youth leadership and helps to run the Taka ni Pato (“Trash is Cash”) recycling and cleaning program with which SC Johnson has partnered to bring new distribution methods for our products.

You can learn about Sammy’s incredible journey from the streets of Nairobi to student life in Manchester by reading Sammy’s biography. Below, in his own words, Sammy relays his desire for more multi-national companies to do work at the BoP.

I hope Sammy’s story inspires and continues to strengthen the case for creating mutual value in new places around the world.

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A Message from Sammy Gitau

When I first started encouraging youths to spend time making the community better, it wasn’t easy. But soon after we started doing simple tasks, like cleaning a church, I would see the faces of our young people filled with pride at the end of the day. We started growing a safer place that over time, yielded positive fruits. At first, the community would say of me, ‘he’s crazy,’ but then over time, people would say, ‘please, work with my son.’

The only culture in the slums was drugs or crime. But when some organizations come, they bring values. I wish you could see people when we started discussing how to work with SC Johnson to build a business. At first, they thought, maybe this is just another of those organizations that would come to advertise, sell to us and eventually go home. But with every workshop, the attitude kept on changing. Their minds were starting to think – as a community - about waking up to do something that is serious, about waking up to build their own business. These workshops with SC Johnson were changing how people looked at themselves.

When multi-nationals come, it helps the local people first to assess themselves. Then they start applying themselves toward the opportunities that are available. It’s not just about giving people hope. I think dignity is the right word. For people just to say, ‘I work with SC Johnson’ or ‘I’m partners with SC Johnson,’ that alone has a lot of weight. You belong to an institution. That by itself has value, even before the monetary value.

Planning is a word you don’t find in the slums. By SC Johnson coming in and facilitating workshops that allowed participants to set own goals, people who did not have goals are now looking beyond a year or two. A person in the community involved in a BoP project portrays a certain image. So then, more and more young people want to get involved. Some of the young people involved in the partnership with SC Johnson now have accounting skills such benefits are for a lifetime no matter what happens.

We have people coming to the youth centers asking for the guys who work with

SC Johnson who do ‘the spraying.’ The community is coining words and this gives the guys values in thinking they are going to get up and do a service that nobody else in the community can do.

My prayer is for more and more companies to come and establish partnerships. Always when you go to the ground that has never been plowed, the work is harder. This work at the BoP is not charity, it is giving our youths dignity and that is greater than any other thing. If you simply give me bread you have killed the dignity in me.  By giving the opportunity and skills to work, you are giving the people confidence and the opportunity for people to appreciate themselves.

The easiest way to tell somebody you don’t belong in the working class is to ask them if they have work experience. These people now have a chance to say, I worked with the BoP project. Slowly by slowly this work is bringing a positive culture and bringing value back to life for the people and putting hope into their hands.