Eight of Jamaica’s most generous private sector corporations have donated a combined $6 billion to charitable causes over the past decade.

Education – from infant schools to adult literacy and individual post-graduate pursuits – has been the primary beneficiary of the prodigious corporate philanthropy, according to data compiled by the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Award programme.

Health and community development also ranked high on the priority list of the donors.

The eight companies are the standouts among dozens of local institutions that have come to embrace a culture of giving and social responsibility, a laudable trend that the annual Business Leader project is seeking to highlight this year.

The sheer magnitude of their generosity, and the impact they have had on transforming the lives of ordinary folks earned the group of eight nomination for this year’s award being held under the theme: ‘Business Leader Corporate Philanthropy’.

The award banquet and presentation will take place on Sunday, December 4, 2016 at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in Kingston starting at 4:30 pm with a cocktail reception. This will be followed at 6:00 pm by the formal presentation at which the Business Leader will be named.

The Jamaica Observer newspaper will begin publishing the story of each nominee on Monday, October 10. Several institutions that have benefited from these extraordinary acts of corporate philanthropy will be featured in subsequent reporting.

Some of the firms that have been nominated have had a deep history of informal contribution to their favourite causes, in many instances away from the glare of the Jamaican media. But over the past several years, with rising global consciousness surrounding the imperative of corporate social responsibility, Jamaican business owners have been creating foundations, both as a way to channel their giving and to publicly embrace this auspicious aspect of their operation.

The scale and collective impact of their generosity emerged during interviews with the principals of the nominated companies, and from reviews of publicly available information on their foundations – from audited annual reports to newspaper stories and their own website accounts of their activities.

One of the more noteworthy bits of statistic is that close to one million individuals have benefited from the donations of the “generous eight” – gifts that reach the target groups either by direct cash, mentorship, business facilitation, training, the creation of, or improvement to existing educational, health or community facilities. There appears to be no limit to the creativity that the donor class has brought to its mission of helping to uplift Jamaica.

Today, countless small businesses owe their existence to this policy of giving back, so, too, thousands of Jamaicans who are now gainfully employed, many of them armed with life-changing skill sets.

This is the 19th renewal of the annual programme. It marks only the third time that corporations rather than individual entrepreneurs are the nominees for the highly coveted award. The first digression was in 2011 when the nominees were Government entities that facilitate the creation, nurturing and expansion of private sector companies. HEART Trust/NTA, the State-entity that trains individuals by the thousands to fill vacancies within the private sector, was declared Business Leader that year.

Similarly, in 2012, as a nod to Jamaica’s 50th year of Independence, the Business Leader programme turned the spotlight on companies that had survived the five decades of our mostly tumultuous post-Independence economy. GraceKennedy Ltd and the Hendrickson family of businesses were jointly selected as the two companies to have had the most profound impact on Jamaica over that period.

This year, two of the country’s most prolific contributors to charity – GraceKennedy and Sandals Group of companies have been excluded from consideration for the award. In the case of GraceKennedy, it has already won the Business Leader Award and by a cardinal rule of the programme, is prohibited from being renominated. Sandals hotel chain is owned by Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart, the chairman and owner of the Jamaica Observer newspaper.

The Business Leader Award programme was cancelled last year for fear that it would clash with the general election. But for the cancellation, this year would have been the 20th edition – the award having started in 1996.

– Moses Jackson is the founder of the Business Leader programme and the chairman of the Award Selection Committee. He may be reached at moseshbsjackson@yahoo.com