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The Corporate Response to Haiti

July 17, 2010 by Robert Greenhill, The Wall Street Journal

The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that jolted Haiti six months ago claimed more than 220,000 lives and destroyed the homes of 1.9 million people. In the massive relief effort that followed, private companies, nonprofit groups and U.N. agencies collaborated in ways they never had before. Their innovative efforts can pay humanitarian dividends for years to come.

These partnerships were not simply one-shot food drives. Instead, companies played a hands-on role to bolster relief agencies—transforming their Web presence, improving alert systems about free vaccinations, and centralizing missing-person databases.

Games developed for Facebook raised $1.5 million for the World Food Program in five days. America's UPS, working together with the TNT, the Dutch express parcel company, and Agility, the global logistics company, transported almost 2,000 metric tons of food and 15,000 metric tons of supplies daily. The Red Cross helped devise a new tool to text message Haitians with cell phones active near vaccination sites. Digicel, the largest mobile telecommunications operator in the Caribbean, transferred instant credit through its mobile phone network to two million Haitians, many of whom didn't have access to their banks. And a customized Google application centralized information about missing persons.

Each of these innovations, documented in a new report by the World Economic Forum, "Innovations in Corporate Global Citizenship: Responding to the Haiti Earthquake," grew out of close contact between corporations and humanitarian agencies that were open to rethinking their conventional operations.

Rather than simply rushing to offer donations, these companies engaged in "full-on" humanitarianism, in the words of McKinsey's Lynn Taliento. For many, like McKinsey, this shift in approach began with the Indonesian tsunami of 2004. McKinsey's experience there proved invaluable in its current work, helping to advise the new Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission. Cisco, Microsoft and Intel followed the same "full-on" approach by partnering with NetHope several years ago, enabling that nonprofit to restore Internet connectivity for more than a dozen humanitarian agencies in Haiti within days of the disaster.

Companies are now building on their experience in Haiti. Google, for example, recognized the need for high-resolution, downloadable maps following the earthquake. In the wake of the BP oil spill, there has been high demand for such imagery and data in the affected area.

The capacity for practical, rapid problem-solving is alive and well in the corporate sector. Companies, in league with relief agencies, are committed and already preparing for the inevitable next disaster.

Mr. Greenhill is the chief business officer and managing director of the World Economic Forum.

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