[:en]President Benigno S. Aquino III of the Philippines Wednesday presented the 2011 AFCSR awards for the best corporate social responsibility programs in Asia .

It was great to see there were again lots of entries in the competition – 175 projects from 14 countries and 129 organizations. The only unfortunate part of the awards presentation is that more of the projects are not recognized. As one of the judges this year, as well as in past years, I know that there are lots of good projects in each of the categories and that there was not that much difference between the winning projects and some of the rest.

Sill it was gratifying to see awards going to a wide variety of companies and projects, with two winners from Thailand, a country that typically has few candidates.

The Health Enhancement award went to a project by Pfizer (Thailand) for a project that provided micro loans, economic empowerment and integrated HIV prevention services for people living with AIDS.

The Link Management company of Hong Kong won the environmental award for a project revitalizing an old city market.

In the Poverty Alleviation category, the prize was share by Citi Pakistan for a microfinance project and Double A (1991) of Thailand for a project helping poor people and rural schools earn extra income by planting a fast-growing variety of tree.

Abbot (Singapore) won the Education Award for a project on science education and the Shangri-La Tanjung Aru Resort won the Intel-AIM Corporate Responsibility Award for integrating environmental care into its core business.

This was the tenth year of the award and it has been good to see not only an increase in the number of award submissions but a general increase in their quality. Hopefully, this is an indicator that more companies are becoming serious about CSR and are making it a part of their overall approach to business.

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