N ational Business Initiative (NBI) was founded in 2005, out of a conviction that Nepal’s business community had a stake in the society it operated within, not just the economy it profited from. Two decades on, that founding idea sits at the heart of a conversation the organisation has kept returning to: what corporate social responsibility actually is, and what it demands of a company that wants to call itself responsible.
For much of the past two decades, corporate social responsibility in Nepal has been treated as something apart from the real business of running a company: a donation here, a sponsorship there, a paragraph in the annual report. That understanding was always too small. CSR was never meant to be an add-on. It is the organic core of what it means to run a responsible business, the part that lives inside daily operations, in how a company treats its own people, long before it ever reaches the strategy document of a company.
The instinct to treat CSR as charity is understandable, but it misses the point.
Businesses should contribute to their communities, especially during disasters and moments of crisis. Responsible business, though, asks a harder question: what impact does this company have on the society around it, and is that impact something worth defending? A company cannot call itself socially responsible because it funds a school while evading taxes, mistreating its workers, polluting
a nearby river, or using political connections to skip past businesses that followed the rules. Responsibility starts with how a business conducts itself every single day: how it treats employees, pays its taxes, deals with suppliers, manages its environmental footprint, prevents corruption, and engages honestly with the people it affects.
This is not an extra burden placed
on business from the outside. It is part of building something that lasts. A company that ignores worker safety eventually pays for it in disruption. Tolerating exploitation eventually poses risks to reputation and, increasingly, the legal standing. Disregarding environmental footprint means losing access to markets, financing and investment altogether in the long run. Responsible business is not the opposite of profitability. It is what makes profitability sustainable.
This is the understanding NBI has tried to build into Nepal’s private sector since its own founding as a peace-building initiative, when business associations first argued that a stable, fair economy could not be separated from a stable, fair society. That argument has since grown into a broader agenda: a national code of conduct, sector alliances, and public platforms built specifically to move companies from principle to practice.
Nepal’s private sector has made real, if uneven, progress on this front. The National Declaration of Business Code of Conduct, endorsed by more than a hundred companies and associations in 2013, was not a mere ceremonial gesture; it was a public commitment, convened by NBI at a time when few institutions were willing to put the idea in writing. The Responsible Business Alliance Nepal initiative form NBI, built around labour rights, human trafficking and modern slavery, has pushed conversations that were nearly absent from Nepali business community a decade ago: workplace dignity, human rights due diligence, environmental accountability, anti-corruption. Through NBI’s Responsible Business Summits, held since 2014, these conversations are now happening among larger crowds, and that itself counts as progress.
But conversation has to turn into behaviour. A code of conduct that sits in a drawer is not responsible business. A CSR policy that only appears in
an annual report is not responsible business. A sustainability commitment that vanishes the moment it becomes inconvenient is not responsible business. The real test of any of this is what a company does when nobody is watching. NBI has been working hard to guide the private sector towards this reality.
Much of the frustration among young Nepalis in recent years echoes concerns that responsible-business advocates, including NBI, have raised for years: that corruption has been normalised, that governance lacks transparency, that political and business power have grown too comfortable with each other. The platforms are new. The message is not.
Young people are asking a more basic question of business than earlier generations did: what kind of society is this business helping build? They are not asking for charity. A narrow view of CSR, one limited to occasional giving, is part of what has widened the gap between young people and the companies they work for or hope to build. They are not looking for jobs that exist to fill a quota; they want work that creates real value. They want dignity, fairness, and businesses that take environmental and social consequences seriously, not as a public relations exercise but as part of how the business actually runs. Leaders who believe they can protect themselves indefinitely through informal arrangements, quietly known in Nepal as “setting,” and political patronage are misreading where this is heading.
The pressure is not only coming from inside the country. As Nepal moves toward greater integration with the global economy, expectations from trading partners and investors are rising too. ESG standards, human rights due diligence and supply-chain accountability are no longer concerns reserved for large exporters. They are becoming part of the baseline for participating in international trade and finance at all. CSR, understood
properly, is not a public-relations exercise sitting beside the real business. It is part of corporate strategy: it affects productivity, talent retention, market access, and the trust of customers and investors alike. Helping Nepali businesses, particularly smaller ones, understand and prepare for this shift is a growing part of NBI’s own mandate.
Much of the daily work of turning principle into practice sits with the people inside a company who deal directly with its workforce. Whether a code of conduct becomes daily behaviour or stays a document in a drawer often comes down to decisions made in human resources, in procurement, in how a company chooses its suppliers and treats its own staff. This is where CSR and responsible business are, quite literally, the same job. Every boardroom decision is a social decision. Every employment decision affects a family. Every procurement decision either reinforces integrity or quietly erodes it.
None of this is easy, but absolutely necessary, and increasingly unavoidable.
Looking back, CSR was never the smaller idea it was once treated as. It was the discipline quietly teaching Nepal’s private sector what being a responsible business would eventually demand, and it is the discipline that NBI has consistently tried to reinforce. Looking ahead, the real measure of progress will not be how many CSR reports get published or how many declarations get signed. It will be whether a young entrepreneur can compete without needing “setting.” Whether a worker can ask for dignity without fear. Whether an honest taxpayer can trust that others are held to the same standard. Being a responsible business is, thus, much bigger than just carrying out corporate social responsibility.
(Joshi is President of National Business Initiative.)
