South Africa: International Health Care Company Improves Lives

America.gov (Washington, DC)

20 October 2008
Posted to the web 21 October 2008

Phillip Kurata

The South African division of Johnson & Johnson (J&J), the world’s largest health care company, played a leading role on the corporate front to topple the apartheid regime and plays a vigorous part now in efforts to defeat the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

J&J has been nominated for the Secretary of State's Corporate Citizenship Award for 2008 in recognition of its positive effect on the communities where it does business.

Roger Crawford, J&J's executive director for South Africa, said his company's commitment to the welfare of the community is borne out by its actions. He read aloud part of the third tenet of J&J's credo, "We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work.... We must encourage civic improvements."

"In the 1980s, when the anti-apartheid struggle was heating up, we felt that we had to take a stand on the side of social justice," Crawford said. Back then, he was a young J&J executive who believed that enlightened corporations could do more to end apartheid by staying engaged than by leaving the country.

J&J embraced the Sullivan principles for responsible business behavior in South Africa, which included ending segregation of the races in all eating, locker room and work facilities and equal and fair employment practices for all employees. Crawford befriended the author of the principles -- Reverend Leon Sullivan, an American Baptist minister and an outspoken critic of apartheid -- and was assigned to organize the international business community to apply the principles.