Potentials of Corporate Social Responsibility for poverty eradication in Nigeria

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is known to keep communities and corporations, institutions, organizations and agencies that are both public and private entities in harmony and with a high sense of keeping a functional social and physical environment for the host communities. This work contends that the present practice of selecting beneficiaries, activities or development projects, and also the pace of project execution by the corporations, can hardly give rapid reduction in poverty and the total elimination of deprivations in rural and urban communities. Using secondary data and interviews of the beneficiaries, community organizations and the corporations, assessment of past activities and future plans, revealed that such endeavours can yield better outputs, with less funding, and higher-level continuity. This is as a result of the beneficiaries’ willingness for all-inclusive participatory project execution to provide and manage community facilities and infrastructure. However, for the overall outlook to community projects’ execution, financing and management; governments and urban authorities has many yet unique roles and ways that sees the different urban socioeconomic settings from differing dimensions. The present global realities have popularised inputs and partnership by the authorities as the main guiding pillar of success in increasing number of ways – one of which is to co-produce, in area specific circumstances, even for projects that corporations can and have been known to carry out successfully.