“What does sustainability look like globally? We all have a responsibility to our communities.”

Update: 22 September 2022

The Centric group's efforts to develop and fund ethical community projects often expand beyond the usual locales in London. A recent example is our work in Ghana, West Africa, through CenGiving - a community give-backed project focussing on taking care of the environment.

We are developing initiatives in the Global South (Colombia, Gambia, Morocco, Ghana and Nigeria) to fund locals to clean beaches and residential areas on a weekly basis. In this new initiative, the local people clean the beaches where littering is a major problem, being used as dumping grounds for rubbish and old clothing. Plastic is also prominent among this debris, clearly visible in the overflowing garbage bags collected by Samo and his fellow volunteers.

Wearing Centric-branded tee-shirts on the weekly beach cleanup, Samo says:

“We’re very proud of the work we’re doing, it’s very helpful to our environment, coastal areas and the entire country. We say thank you to the Centric team members. It’s good of them to do this as we can help ourselves … I work in happiness.”

His pride is well placed. His country joined the Global Plastic Association Partnership in 2019 to tackle the menace of plastic pollution afflicting the country. Several initiatives were set up to try to eradicate well over a million tons of plastic waste per year, with less than 5% of it collected for recycling. (Source: Global Plastic Association Partnership website.)

Ghana is one of a handful of countries to launch a national plastic pollution plan backed by the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Development Program.

It’s vital too as lots of these plastic waste ends up in the oceans, having a detrimental effect on marine wildlife and its ecosystem. The massive Ghanaian fishing industry and coastal communities also suffer the consequences of the damage caused by plastic pollution.

Centric believes it is important to keep close ties to such initiatives, particularly those which are ethical and have an environmental or sustainability nuance. We want to develop further similar projects, such as a food-run project with Betty Wilson, supporting poor families in Nigeria.

Another initiative is improving sanitary conditions in parts of Accra, Ghana, plus ethical female-led initiatives in Morocco. Within this context of distrust, we hold it is vital that although we are rooted in largely localised London-centric projects, the connection to the Global South and its challenges around ethical environmental initiatives and climate change must not be overlooked.

These are issues that must be given paramount attention. One of our aims with CenGiving is to launch a ‘Global Clean-Up Day’ involving community action towards environmental protection, building incentives at local levels and helping the environmental agenda become relevant to the urban locale.

CenGiving is particularly significant as we have noticed there is a lack of involvement from the urban space in the climate change, green and environmental agendas. There appears to be no platform for those from such locales to express their ideas on this agenda as they currently find no affinity with the narrative.

If you are involved or interested in corporate social responsibility projects of this type, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch and we can discuss further: welcome@centric.org.uk

You can see exclusive footage of the beach cleanup by simply playing the above video playlist which also includes footage of our newly launched CenGiving project in Gambia. Or visit our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Don’t forget to follow us too so you’re always up to date with our work and please share, like, comment, etc on our posts ... let us know what you think.