Giving Compass' Take:

• Ashish K. Jha and Peter Sands report that only 9% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies have a global health strategy, while 74% have an environmental strategy.

• How can funders help to drive investment in tracking and improve corporate impacts on global health? 

• Learn about making CSR a priority. 

Why is it that only 9% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies have a global health strategy, while 74% have an environmental strategy?

The answer lies in the very different relationship that the private sector has with the environmental community versus its relationship with the global health community.

Through a combination of challenge and constructive engagement, environmental activists have succeeded in getting the private sector to embrace sustainability as both an obligation and an opportunity. By contrast, the global health community often finds it hard to engage with even those companies directly involved in health care, and has largely failed to involve the broader private sector in the community’s mission to improve people’s health and well-being across the globe.

In 2002, environmental leaders in the United Nations warned that only a small number of companies were taking environmental and social concerns into consideration for their operations. Since then, a combination of activism, regulation, and corporate leadership have transformed the picture: Most big companies now have explicit environmental strategies, with clear metrics they report on. The contrast with health is striking.

Only 4% of the companies we studied specify any kind of health goal, while 55% commit to an emissions reduction goal. If we strip out the most obvious sectors from the analysis—pharmaceuticals, food and drink manufacturers, and health care providers—hardly any other companies appear to think they need a health strategy (6%) or a health impact report (1%).On the surface, these companies appear to regard health issues as equally deserving of corporate philanthropy as environmental issues, with an equal share—32%—listing each area as a focus for corporate giving. Yet climate change and broader environmental issues are now treated like business priorities, with strategies and metrics, while global health is not.

Read the full article about global health as a CSR priority by Ashish K. Jha and Peter Sands at Fortune.