PricewaterhouseCoopers address professional needs at Hagar during two week project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Kevin Teo

October 1, 2009

Over the first two weeks of September 2009, five partners from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) worked with Hagar International on a variety of workstreams that meet professional needs of Hagar’s social businesses.

These include tax advice and operations review of Hagar’s Catering business, business planning for a new Hydrologic – an enterprise that sells water filters – and advisory input on leasing agreements of Hagar’s factory in Phnom Penh.  The PwC team, with assistance from the local PwC Cambodia office, worked with more than ten senior managers across Hagar’s operating entities to accomplish this broad set of objectives within the two week timeframe.

This engagement is part of the “Developing Responsible Leaders” (DRL) program at PwC which targets senior executives within the firm and focuses on leadership and professional development through engaging with social enterprises in a developing world context.  Volans partnered with Pivotal Leadership – an organizational development consultancy – to put together this project.  For several months prior to the trip, Pivotal and Volans had regular communication with the program leaders at PwC to design the DRL program, focussing on the talent development objectives for PwC, while being mindful of delivering tangible long-term value to Hagar.

At the start of the trip, the DRL participants were introduced to Cambodia’s grim history through a tour of the Toul Sleng museum, which was a primary school converted into a prison and torture chamber.  We also visited the slum areas where Cambodia Living Arts worked to pass on endangered traditional Khmer performing arts to the next generation, by offering scholarships as well as stipends to children from these communities to attend school.  Despite the bustling downtown scene in Phnom Penh, most of which is fuelled by international aid and NGO dollars, the typical Cambodian still lives by the fringes of this economy under dire circumstances.  With this context around Cambodia, the team embarked on engaging the various Hagar departments on the list of objectives they had agreed to address.

 

Aside from meeting the professional needs of Hagar, DRL team also organized a day trip for close to 200 children from Hagar’s Children Learning Centre.  We had arranged for this outing to take place at Kirirom resort, a two hour bus ride outside of Phnom Penh.  When our convoy of five coaches arrived at the resort, it quickly dawned on us that the resort was well past its hey day and that the photos we had seen on the promotional material were severely outdated.  Various logistical challenges cropped up as the resort staff scrambled to meet the needs of 200 screaming children; one example being that we had been promised four ponies at the pony ride station whereas the staff we previously liaised with had failed to mention that the resort only had one saddle.  Nonetheless, the day was saved when we declared open season on the resort’s swimming pool and almost immediately, close to a hundred children screamed and jumped into what must have been smaller than a 25-meter pool.

 

All in all, much was accomplished by the PwC team during the two week stay and as the participants indicated, they had learned a lot about themselves and from one another.  There was acknowledgement that engaging with social enterprises provided a new dimension to closer collaboration with communities in need, and there is continued interest to deepen this relationship with Hagar as well as possibly other social enterprises in Cambodia.