As part of its range of corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign for this year, Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) and the UAE Red Crescent Society together with various UAE based charitable organisations launched a range of humanitarian campaigns for Ramadan by initiating a charity collection drive in Dubai and the Northern Emirates.
The company joined Tasjeel, a vehicle testing and registration service to introduce the “Dirham wa’Bas” campaign, where from the registration fees for every car, AED1 (US$0.27) is contributed to the UAE based charity, Bait Al Khair Society. The charity in turn provided free LPG refills to 300 underprivileged families.
“Being an oil and gas organisation, it is very important for us to showcase our responsibilities towards the community,” said Khalid Hadi, group brand and marketing manager for ENOC.
“It’s important to show the public that we are also giving back to the community through our corporate social responsibilities,” he said.
The company which has been running its CSR campaigns for 15 years, ran 20 community-wide activities in 2009 and is working together with logistics provider, Aramex to organise the collection and shipping of donations from ENOC’s customers for the relief effort in the aftermath of the devastating Pakistan floods.
Cultural differences
Hadi explains that CSR is implemented in the west for various reasons, one of them being tax. This is not the case of regional companies like ENOC he says as there are no taxes to incentivise this behaviour.
“Our objective is basically to be seen as a corporate good citizen, so we don’t really have any hidden agenda when it comes to our CSR activities,” he says.
“We don’t look at it as making money, that is not our objective, we don’t even want to see it or position it that way.”
“We want to make sure that we are doing our role in the community and we are hoping that all other organisations within the UAE do similar activities.”
Hadi says ENOC wants to work closely with organisations within and outside the oil and gas community to promote the CSR concept within the UAE and internationally. He added that up till now, ENOC has not approached other oil and gas organisations but is keen to do so.
Hadi urged other organisations to follow ENOC’s example and provide CSR programmes that would benefit the greater community.
