The center is a collaboration between the Swedish government and Save the Children Sweden in China. Save the Children is a non-governmental organization engaged in protecting children's rights and improving their lives internationally.

Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, secretary-general of the International Save the Children Alliance, and Henrik Holmquisk, Strategic Alliances of Save the Children Sweden, spoke with China Business Weekly reporter Liu Jie about the center's mission, functions and goals during their recent visit to Beijing.

Q: The CSR Child Rights Competence Center is to be officially set up in Beijing this September, would you like to tell us the reasons behind the establishment of the center and its goals?

Gornitzka: Save the Children believes strongly that corporations together with others can improve children's lives directly or maybe more indirectly in their businesses. 我们So far, companies are increasingly interested in CSR. The Swedish government has signed an agreement with the Chinese government regarding CSR, and what that means is that the Swedish government will support Chinese companies to develop their CSR work.

The most debated or discussed issue within the CSR context today is environment, especially climate change. And that is good, it's important. But what we, Save the Children and the new center, want to do is to take part by offering companies knowledge about children's rights and how they can work with children's rights within their CSR work.

So the purpose of the competence center is to provide knowledge the corporation can use when they develop CSR to bring in children's issues alongside with other CSR issues.

Q: What will the CSR Child Rights Competence Center do in China?

Holmquisk: It's Save the Children Sweden who is the initiator of this CSR Child Rights Competence Center here in Beijing. Our Prime Minster (Fredrik Reinfeldt) presented it at a big CSR conference held in Beijing recently with some different Chinese ministers.

It is important that that center will not only be for Swedish companies coming into China but also help all kinds of companies coming here to do business and Chinese companies who are exporting from China.

Because in today's world, consumers are very interested in CSR and they think it's very important that whether the companies that they buy products from are responsible corporate citizens or not.

So for the Chinese companies who want to be successful in overseas market, this will be very important.

The center itself will do three things. Firstly it will conduct trainings and it will give seminars and different conferences around CSR questions with the children's rights perspective.

Secondly, it will study the development of how CSR and children's rights questions are progressing in China.

Thirdly, the center can be used for companies for consultations and joint programs and so on.

Gornitzka: What we want companies to do is to think through how the Conventions of the Rights of Children (CRC), does it mean anything to companies' own business? CRC says everything is ultimately in the best interest of the children.

If the companies would start to look at the way they do their businesses, think about if it is in the interest of the children, they would maybe have to change things if they really want to act in the best interests of the children.

Also companies and organizations like Save the Children can work together to do practical things like supporting education programs, health work and activities for children that are parallel to their businesses.

We want to advise companies how to promote children's rights in their way of doing business and also promote projects that are serving society.

Q: Would you like to set an example that what corporations can do to promote children's rights in their business?

Gornitzka: Let me give you an example, using Ikea.

They have very complete CSR work, where children's issues play a big part. They have decided to see how the Conventions of the Rights of Children would mean to their business. The most concrete thing is that they have people working to find out if they do the best things for children as well as supporting related projects.

What they want to primarily support is education, so they want to make sure that children in areas where Ikea works, have a good education. By having a good education, children will have chance to get good careers. It's a way of giving children a good start in their lives.

They are also raising funds for organizations such as us, to help carry out education and other programs.

Ikea also takes their social responsibility for their suppliers. They run dialogue with all the suppliers ensuring that the suppliers also think about the best interests of the children. I also know here in China they have also collaborated with Volkswagen on road safety. Holmquisk: We want to have long-term cooperation with companies, we just don't want companies to have just one-year program and say they have been working on CSR. So we are trying to combine concepts that really make things work. That's exciting and that's real.

Q: When corporations offer financial support, they may have their own agenda or requirements. How can you make sure that, in addition to helping children, the interest of corporations is fulfilled?

Gornitzka: That is something we really need to be very strict about. This competence center makes that easier, because we can give advice, but we may not end up cooperating, because if we have conflicting interests, it must not be a project together with Save the Children.

Going back 10 years, we were put into the situation sometimes, when the donor came to us and said: 'I have money, I want to do this.'

But we know our business much better today, so we know why we work with the companies, we want to influence them in how they can work better with children, and we already know the projects that we want corporations to be involved in, so we have a higher integrity today.

Holmquisk: I can tell from the Swedish perspective of Save the Children how we work with companies. When we have a new connection with a company, we always start talking about the foundation that we share the same beliefs.

We screen the company because we as an organization cannot work with companies within such fields as cigarettes, alcohol and weapons. If there's any question, we take this company's profile to our ethnics committee for them to decide. Members of the committee come from our board directors and from experts in the field. They can make judgments on if the company is suitable to work with Save the Children.

After that we will go in the discussions of what we want to do together. And it is very, very important to have the agreement on (a contract) drawn up by experts, so there are no questions what our obligations are, what our counterpart's obligations are and what will happen if we have disagreements.

As one of the world's biggest independent children's rights organization, we know that we have very strong brand name and logo, therefore we are extremely careful about lending that logo to companies, and we very strictly regulate how companies can use the logo.

But that (contract and logo lending) is not the only way we work. There are companies that give money as one-time gifts or donations to us. We don't sign contracts with them and they don't get anything back, but they support us.