Business of Water Poses Challenges for MBAs at Oxford Saïd

The University of Oxford Saïd Business School has announced the winners of an annual project-based competition that has a strong focus on social responsibility.

The Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO) program is an example of the school’s applied learning components and is available to students on both the Oxford MBA and EMBA programs. This year’s edition has seen 340 students of the school tackle problems relating to water security over a period of five months.

Access to safe drinking water and how water winds its way through the world’s cities proved to be the most popular areas addressed by this year’s participants, and out of a total of the 64 projects submitted, 40 looked at either the region of Asia or Africa in their attempts to combine aspects of social responsibility with practical business solutions.  

Corporate social responsibility of London monopoly questioned

However, one of the three winners laid its focus far closer to the home of Oxford Saïd, in the UK capital of London, which is described as a ‘water-stressed’ city. This project serves as a useful illustration in what appears to be a faltering sense of corporate social responsibility. London’s only water supplier, Thames Water is derided as being monopolistic and guilty of paying out more in stakeholder dividends than the annual profits it accumulates, leaving much-needed reinvestment in infrastructure unfunded. A partial buy-out to form a public–private partnership that can serve London’s expanding population more efficiently forms the crux of the winning project’s solution here.

Bangladesh and India are the focus of Oxford Saïd’s two other winners. One looked at access to clean water for the millions who live on the fringes of society in Mumbai’s slums. The other, meanwhile, considered how to combat the effects of naturally occurring arsenic in water taken from aid-funded wells in Bangladesh, the long-term effects of which are largely unknown to the local population.

The GOTO program, offered since 2012/13, has been described in an interview with Oxford Saïd’s dean, Peter Tufano on TopMBA.com as part of the school’s “commitment” towards working with problems felt the world over, the implications they hold for business and the question of social responsibility. It’s also a good excuse to use the breadth of expertise found across the university as a whole, which participants are able to interact with as part of the program. 

“The GOTO project enabled our students to understand the underlying problems and future scenarios in which new business models can manage water for the collective good,” Tufano said of the program’s latest edition.