Partnership with Plieger featured in Dutch newspaper
We are proud that our partnership with Plieger Netherlands and Vajra Holland has been featured in the Dutch national daily newspaper. Four Symmetrons, led by our Managing Director Mr. Damodar Paudel has been managing data cleansing and enrichment project on behalf of our Dutch business partners. In turn we have been donating a part of the revenue generated to Vajra Foundation Nepal for operation of Vajra School as our corporate social responsibility initiative. We feel this business model has been immensely successful, as Plieger is helping us, we are helping Plieger and Dept and we both are helping a charitable cause in Nepal.
The news published in the national daily is translated as below:
Nepalese people maintain Dutch webshop
Charity or a good business model?
Outsourcing Since the corona crisis, sanitary systems wholesaler Plieger has been outsourcing work to a Nepalese company. Cheaper and good for the local labour market.
When Koert Huisman visited Nepal again last year after two decades, he was particularly struck by the progress. “Wooden houses had given way to cement ones. And I sat on a deserted mountain facetiming with the home front. The connection there was excellent!” The distinctive temples, tuktuks and roaming cows were still there to remind him of the country where he had volunteered in 2001.
Huisman is director of wholesale sanitary systems Plieger of Zaltbommel, with some 730 employees. In that capacity, he traveled to Nepal in early 2020. Plieger had just turned 100 years old. To celebrate, Huisman and his fellow board members decided to make a donation to the organization for which he had volunteered as a twenty-something: Vajra Foundation, which focuses on education, health care and ecology.
Even after the coronavirus broke out, Huisman kept in touch with the foundation and further strengthened ties with Nepal. Plieger now also focuses on outsourcing through Vajra: outsourcing work to a company in Nepal. Is that charity, or just a good business model?
The global corona crisis has also hit Nepal, already one of the poorest countries in the world before the outbreak, hard. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated last May that about a quarter of Nepal’s jobs are affected. Possible effects: lower wages, fewer hours of work or complete job loss.
At the time, Huisman called his Nepalese contact Damodar Paudel, founder of a local consulting and accounting firm. That made him realize how serious the situation was there. “The Nepalese government was taking no action,” Huisman says. “And graduate students were barely finding jobs.”
Paudel, too, was having a hard time. “His customers were all drying up,” is how Huisman expresses it. He decided to give his company work from Plieger, mainly around data processing, updating the webshop with new information, for example. “It was mainly about cleaning up contaminated data. That becomes more important for all companies the more you digitalize.”
The fledgling collaboration was a success, says Huisman. “They are all highly educated boys and girls, who can speak English well and know how to handle Word, Excel and databases,” he says. “And originally they are accountants, so they were also very meticulous.”
He now calls the collaboration a “win-win situation”: a year after the crisis began, the Nepalese company is still working for Plieger. The plumbing company pays about 8 euros per hour and makes donations to Vajra separately. That is less than the minimum wage of 9.72 euros per hour in the Netherlands for workers over 21 with a forty-hour work week.
Outsourcing work to less developed countries is not new. Critics say it is one of the problems of increasing globalization: developed economies outsource work to countries where labor is cheaper, resulting in job loss in developed countries. In addition, exploitation is lurking because of shadowy controls on working conditions.
Maarten Olthof, founder of Vajra Foundation, acknowledges that there are drawbacks to the construction. “You will always have people saying: they are stealing our jobs,” he says. Yet in the corona crisis, he sees a need for similar partnerships. “In the Netherlands we sometimes forget that the situation in the Third World is much worse than ours. In general, but during the corona crisis especially. A country like Nepal doesn’t have a stable government, healthcare is ramshackle and support measures are almost non-existent.”
Although Olthof encourages the stimulation of labor markets in other countries, he says it is a bad idea to look for a partner in a developing country on the spur of the moment. “In countries where there is a lot of corruption, it can be very difficult to enter into such a partnership. There are NGOs everywhere that bring in a lot of money, but hardly do anything.” Lack of visibility into working conditions, potentially resulting in exploitation, is also a problem, he says.
Since last year, his foundation has been working as an intermediary between Dutch and Nepalese companies. Meanwhile, a second candidate has come forward: marketing company Dept from Amsterdam (550 employees in the Netherlands) has also been working with Paudel’s accountancy firm since last spring. Dept also mainly outsources data processing. A success, says project manager Sander Hendriks of Dept.
For the marketing company, the corona crisis was the main reason for starting the project. “Since everyone at our company now works digitally from home, contact with the other side of the world is easier,” says Hendriks.
“And it’s super-fine that we now have extra hands for some projects. Those would otherwise have been postponed or not happened at all.”
Hendriks emphasizes the social contribution to Nepal. In addition, the construction is also commercially interesting. “Enriching data with extra information is mainly manual work,” he says. That work takes a relatively long time. “It is almost impossible, financially and commercially, to have this done in the Netherlands. Seen from the business perspective, it’s also really a good choice.”
Director Huisman of Plieger also admits, “The kind of work we have done in Nepal is just not a sexy job in the Netherlands. Cleaning up data is a heathen task, monotonous and boring. In the Netherlands it is too expensive to have that kind of work done.”
Vajra founder Olthof sees the construction as an opportunity for Dutch companies to show their best side. That they save money in the process, he does not find problematic. “It is simply a fact that work is cheaper there and that may also be a motivation for some companies,” Olthof says. It should not be forgotten that realizing such a partnership takes a lot of time. “I therefore think that the construction is particularly interesting for people who are not just looking to save money.”
This news is the translated version published in the following news:
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