Mondi: Social impact measurement of Mondi’s community investments and activities
The project was one of Mondi’s responses to a 2005 Socio-Economic Assessment Toolbox (SEAT) finding that recognized orphan care as a serious issue in Mondi’s local operations.
Mondi aims to develop a simple, fit-for-purpose, robust and scalable framework and methodology that will measure the impact and value that Mondi’s community investments and activities have on beneficiary communities and the business. As the Isibindi project has a broad and comprehensive focus involving health, education, infrastructure and employment support (directly or indirectly), Mondi chose it as a pilot project for this framework.
A range of business value drivers lie behind Mondi’s decision to measure the impacts of its community activities:
- A more targeted and strategic approach founded on value creation for the business and for the communities, based on measurement of outcomes and impacts;
- Demonstrating the impacts of community investments on Mondi’s other key stakeholder groups (such as employees, government, contractors, suppliers and customers);
- Using the results of the analysis to improve and develop the program to make it more effective and to make improvements to the current community investments;
- Demonstrating the effectiveness of Mondi’s community investments to make the business case for community engagement stronger both internally and externally;
- Using the results for reporting requirements and for certification requirements.
- No
- Project
- Quantitative
- South Africa
- Access to essential services
- Skills & knowledge
- Direct operations
- Forest and Paper products
Key findings
Given that the aim of the project was to identify group-level KPIs, integrating the process and results of the assessment into the business was part of the process from inception. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a broadly recognized common language and aligning local KPIs to the SDGs offers an efficient communication channel for group-level and external communication. Mondi also understands the importance of setting up the right structure internally through country liaisons and the appropriate level of capacity building to allow continuous assessment once the consultants are gone.
The next step for Mondi is to roll out the social impact assessment framework to other projects in other countries and to validate its applicability across locations.
The main finding of the Isibindi Social Impact Measurement Assessment is that Mondi and its partners are creating lasting improvements in the quality of life for the main beneficiaries of the project, namely orphans, their families and child and youth care workers.
The exercise has proven very valuable for Mondi at different levels:
- It has strengthened the business case around the project’s contribution to Mondi’s sustainable development commitments.
- It has strengthened Mondi’s relationships with the partners who implement much of the work on the ground and highlighted the role of partnership models in the long-term success of projects.
- It has given renewed energy to the care workers who are the data collectors as they can see the importance of their work and understand how the data, which they spend a considerable amount of time collecting, is being put to good use.
The data helps to track progress and maximize the positive impact that the project can have on the children and on their lives.