MünchenAs an entrepreneur, you take a lot of risks. There are difficult times and many an entrepreneur has suffered a defeat from which he or she will never recover. But the great advantage as a business owner is that you can design things and really make a difference. Furthermore, you can choose the people with whom you want to work with (or not work with).
Corporate Social Responsibility
A question of fairness
Long before the minimum wage debate, it was a question of fairness and entrepreneurial responsibility to provide our employees with the right salary. Our business ethos forbids low wages or having interns work without pay.
Gender equality? Same pay for same work? That is, and has always been, self-evident for us. We have a transparent system of uniform salaries for each performance level – regardless of whether for a man or a woman! Anything else would contradict our value system!
We take responsibility for our partnerships and client relationships. Therefore, Barkawi rejects projects that may take place in countries where kidnapping is a daily fare, for example.
Making a contribution
We are aware that we cannot save the world, but we can try to solidify our footprint and make a contribution every year.
Children are especially important to us. Often, they are literally just around the corner because Munich has abject poverty and then sometimes, they are far away in a country without medical care. Over and over, we continue to support projects that meet the following criteria:
- Unconventional and pragmatic help for children
- Projects with high individual initiative of a single person with a good idea
- Projects and initiatives without media coverage and without publicity and/or support
- Projects and initiatives with exclusively charitable or volunteer staff
Selected initiatives with high impact
In developing countries, very little money given through private initiatives can already move a lot. For example, a pastor runs a soup kitchen for children who live in the sewers; a decommissioned German high-tech incubator saves babies’ lives; a German plastic surgeon gives disfigured children in Africa a new face; a small village school, created during a social service internship, teaches children reading and writing to help them find the way out of the poverty trap. If we can help the Munich food bank "pro bono" with our humble logistics expertise to do great things through intelligent route planning and with much less trips and fewer helpers, we'll gladly do that!
