Transparency and Compliance Challenges

for Companies in Myanmar

Unilever Suppliers ConferenceVicky Bowman, Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business

Chatrium, Yangon 22 July 2015

www.mcrb.org.mmmyanmar.responsible.business

Current core funders:• UK DFID• DANIDA • Norway• Switzerland• Netherlands• Ireland

www.myanmar-responsiblebusiness.org15 Shan Yeiktha Street, Sanchaung, Yangon Tel/Fax: 01 510069

Founders:

MCRB ObjectiveTo provide an effective and legitimate platform for the creation of knowledge, capacity and dialogue concerning responsible business in Myanmar, based on local needs and international standards, that results in more responsible business practices.

ပ၍တာဝနယမႈရေသာ စပြားေရးအေလအကငမား

ျဖစထြနးလာေစရန၊ ႏငငတကာအဆငအတနးမား၊

ေဒသလအပခကမားအေပၚမတည၍ ျမနမာႏငင၌

တာဝနယမႈရေသာ အသပညာ၊ စြမးေဆာငရညႏင စကားဝငးမား

ျဖစေပၚလာေစရနအတြက ထေရာကေသာ တရားဝင

အခငးအကဥးတစခ ပပးေပးရန။

MCRB defines ‘responsible business’ as ‘business activities that work for the long-term interests of Myanmar and all its people’.MCRB ၏အဓပၸါယဖြငဆခက “ျမနမာျပညသျပညသားမား၏ေရရညအကးစးပြားမား အတြကေဆာငရြကေသာစးပြားေရးလပငနးမား”

Myanmar laws e.g.◦ Labour◦ Health, Safety and Environment◦ Anti-corruption◦ Myanmar Investment Commission Permit, company registration

Home country law (Unilever – UK and Netherlands, EU eg◦ UK Bribery Act (based on OECD)◦ UK Modern Slavery Act

Myanmar-specific reporting requirements – US companies only International standards, partnerships and initiatives eg◦ UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights◦ International Standards Organisation (ISO 14001, 9001 etc)◦ UN Global Compact (Unilever since 2010)◦ OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises

Company commitments and partnerships with NGOs ◦ eg Unilever with Oxfam and Solidaridad, Unilever Sustainable Living Plan,

Unilever 1st Human Rights Report June 2015, Global Social Compliance Programme, Women’s Empowerment Principles

Business environment◦ Unclear, changing or non-existent laws◦ Corruption, teamoney◦ Lack of government enforcement of laws e.g.

labour, environment Lack of awareness and capacity of Myanmar

business to comply◦ e.g. knowledge of Workplace Coordinating Committee,

required under law for companies with more than 30 staff Lack of experienced Myanmar staff in compliance

function in company and in suppliers

100 large Myanmar companies chosen based on 2013/4 top taxpayers lists as a proxy for size

Websites reviewed for content on:Organisational transparencyAnti-corruption programmesHuman Rights and HSE, including grievance

mechanisms (instead of country by country tax reporting as in TI TRAC report)

New: Civil society organisation/public input sought and recent media reports scanned

2015 rankings

Serge Pun and Associates (Myanmar)/SPA Group

Serge Pun and Associates (Myanmar)/SPA Group

Workshops planned in 2015/2016 with companies on good practice: Anti-corruption programmes Human rights policies Reporting Grievance mechanisms

Plans for Mini Pwint Thit Sa (2015/6) – rating SMEs who volunteer, according to the same scoring schedule.

3rd Pwint Thit Sa report 2016

www.mcrb.org.mmmyanmar.responsible.business

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