Posted on 14/01/2019

BRUSSELS (Belgium), January 14, 2019 – Capacity building is at the heart of Drive Sustainability’s impact-focused approach. In 2018, Drive Sustainability doubled the scope of its supplier trainings year-on-year, involving 650 suppliers in 5 countries – Hungary, Spain, Mexico, Thailand, China – on how to improve their sustainability performance. Statistics from training participant consultations show that the interpretation of sustainability varies from country to country.

Impact through a solution-oriented learning approach

Drive Sustainability’s Face-2-Face training approach prioritizes solution-oriented learning. Following an introduction to the local sustainability context, suppliers in a workshop-style setting analyse shared challenges, root causes and ultimately develop improvement plans under expert guidance. Statistics from training participant consultations show that the interpretation of sustainability and prioritization of issues varies by country.

Participant consultations 2018 reveal cross-country differences


Regarding sustainability maturity level, all suppliers gave utmost importance to the avoidance of long-term risk. This reflects an already mature engagement of the attending Tier 1 suppliers on the topic of sustainability. However, whereas in Hungary and Spain cost and efficiency opportunities ranked in second place, the avoidance of short-term risks such as factory closures due to governmental sanctions remain ever more pertinent in China.

A publication analysing sustainability trends, challenges, respective root causes and identified solutions across 2018’s training countries will be published in the first quarter of 2019 in collaboration with Deloitte Belgium. Deloitte locally implements the Drive Sustainability trainings through its global network. CSR Europe* designs and globally facilitates the Drive Sustainability training offer.

Towards an integrated training offer

More than 80% of training participants in 2018 reported having gained new ideas on how to solve their company’s sustainability challenges during the training.

Nevertheless, Drive Sustainability recognizes that pre-training preparation, follow-up support and monitoring over time are essential to increase impact and understand change precursors. Moreover, Face-2-Face trainings are limited in terms of reach. Going forward, Drive Sustainability is planning the launch of an integrated training offer comprised of a preparatory eLearning, knowledge assessment, Face-2-Face training and impact monitoring by 2020.

Training countries 2019

Meanwhile, we plan to expand the reach of our Face-2-Face trainings in 2019, training even more suppliers in China, South Africa and Mexico as well as for the first time covering Malaysia, Poland and Brazil.

To learn more about our capacity building activities, visit https://drivesustainability.org/capacity-building/.

 

*CSR Europe is the global facilitator of Drive Sustainability. It is the leading European business network for Corporate Social Responsibility. Through its network of 46 corporate members and 41 National CSR organisations, CSR Europe gathers over 10,000 companies, and acts as a united platform for those businesses looking to enhance sustainable growth and positively contribute to society. CSR Europe is the European hub incubating multi-stakeholder initiatives that tackle the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.