Socialise for equity: An innovative approach to stakeholder management

Without any doubt, ideas matter. From time to time, great ideas have emerged from the brink of the thought of men on a quest to shift the envelope of human knowledge endowment and in the process, make human existence better than they met it. All that we know today in the different areas of human endeavour are products of ideas- the Bluetooth, internet,  Law of Relativity, Space Exploration, Rational Market Hypothesis, Management by Objective, Electric cars and countless other innovations have a spark of ideas as it foundation.

In our clime, popularly referred to in mainstream literature as third world, innovative ideas  are not easy to come by, either due to the lack of necessary  exposure for those who dare to or due to the complete absence of ideas cause by pre-occupation for  daily survival. Despite this challenge however, an idea: Socialize for Equity has emerged as a bold new concept in the area of business management. An observed trend over the time shows that there is a disconnect between the aspiration of promoters of  business  enterprises-both for profit and charity; and the executors of the ideas, the daily workers, often leading to friction in the respective relationships: be it between shareholders and board, multi-nationals and host community and even political constituency projects and benefiting community. Socialize for equity is specifically defined as a concept that  addresses the  idea of user requirement  in terms of earning complete “buy-in” of the workers or user in a business enterprise or project by awarding them greater involvement along with the necessary incentives that  such ownership attracts.

The general idea behind this is that workers and project beneficiaries are more driven to protect and promote that which they have ownership of than that forced upon them by donors, sponsors or top management. It has been observed that when performing organisations partner with host communities and it’s daily corporate workers, advantages include improve business security ranging from fewer or no incidences of sabotage, lower operation costs, sustained positive and intended project outcomes as well as spin-off benefits, increased mutual trust, all resulting in increased social capital which can benefit the organisations, beneficiaries, society and the economy as a whole

An extensive review of literature validates this notion that the probability of enterprise and project success or failure has a lot to do with socialize for equity. The following examples show the concept in practice, either the presence or absence of same. The defunct Oil and Mineral Producing Area Development Commission(OMPADEC) had responded to the request by the MbiabetIkpe community to sink a borehole for the community, after a successful completion through mutual collaboration where the manual labour and technical support was provided by the community and the Commission respective, the water pump developed a fault and later the overhead tank also leaked, the community refused to contribute towards the repair and returned to the stream instead, this project failed mainly because Socialize for Equity was missing where the project ownership and outcome, either partly or wholly was not placed in the hands of the end users-the host community.

In Uganda, several government projects implemented between 2005 and 2014, the E-Tax, aimed at making it easier and less costly to pay tax, Friend a Gorrila with the aim of raising the status of the Bwindi impenetrable forest to a world heritage site, E-water billing system and the student information system all failed as Socialize for Equity was missing. All this projects where IT based without the buy-in of end users, it was found that for any app to be comprehensive and useful, the update of data by app users, feedback and referral system to bolster ownership would ensure success, financially and otherwise. Several other examples are evident globally, from China to the United Kingdom of the failure of well-intended, large scale project that failed to live up to expectation due to the absence of socialize for Equity.

In conclusion, we believe this idea to be relevant, especially in present resources scarce local and global environment where the scale for success and failure is large, even in micro social settings like the family system, the concept comes in handy as more collaboration is needed to minimise resources wastage, especially in the present economic recession.

 

Toochukwu Ezukanma