As a partner on the ESD Project, Meridian’s developed new approaches to engaging the private sector in health as part of its role to negotiate partnerships with companies through Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives and other collaborations with the private sector. Meridian was also responsible for Behavior Change Communication activities within the project.  Meridian worked to integrate commercial sector engagement strategies into other activities in the ESD portfolio, such as the Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancy (HTSP), gender-based violence, promoting and scaling-up best practices, community mobilization and capacity building, and youth engagement.

Meridian created a partnership with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the leading global business association promoting responsible business practices.  Meridian provide BSR technical assistance on the development and launch of its worker health education initiative, Health Enables Returns Project (HERproject), which facilitated corporate-sponsored workplace activities for women’s health.  Meridian produced three return on investment studies, two with HERproject, which have proved be effective advocacy tools for attracting private sector support for RH/FP services.

Meridian has launched a range of innovative workplace partnerships including with:

• Unilever Tea Tanzania (later expanded to Unilever Tea Kenya) to create a male engagement program tailor to the corporate workplace that aimed to change gender relations and male attitudes and behaviors related to health.  The program was titled Healthy Images of Manhood (HIM).
• Bayer-Schering Pharmaceutical (BSP) to create and distribute education brochures on Family Planning based on the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy (HTSP) messages. These were distributed through BSP Africa networks and well as ESD project sites in Africa.
• The Calvert Group (the largest socially-responsible investment fund in the U.S.), to provide technical assistance on health in the development and launch of the Calvert Women’s Principles to guide corporations on gender equitable practices. These were later adopted by the City of San Francisco as the Gender Equality Principles.  Meridian provided tools and resources to the online site. (These principles became the basis for the UN Global Compact’s seven Women’s Empowerment Principles.)