New York, Riyadh – The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Business Call to Action signs a financing agreement with the Arab Gulf Programme for Development (AGFUND) to boost impact management and implementation of the SDGs.

With Sudan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as focused countries, the new partnership will establish an increased Business Call to Action (BCtA) presence in the Arab region to promote the concept of inclusive business for impact management enterprises. 

The partnership presents a key opportunity for expanding the adoption of inclusive business to new stakeholders and formalizing the concept of business-generated social impact across the Arab region, thereby further expanding BCtA’s global presence.  

The Agreement, signed on behalf of Arab Gulf Programme for Development by AGFUND President His Royal Highness Abdulaziz bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and on behalf of the UN Development agency by UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner, earmarks AGFUND’s contribution for capacity building training of 2,000 SMEs in impact management in a ‘train-the-trainers’ model delivered through three state-based microfinance institutions, as facilitated by BCtA’s Impact Lab.

Gender-focused 

The partnership will also produce an online training curriculum and video tutorials on SDG-aligned and gender-smart impact management processes to be streamlined to a broad audience throughout the selected countries. 

The programme adopts an embedded gender focus across all outlined activities with the aim of promoting the achievement of the Global Goals both through empowering women-led businesses to scale up the impact achieved by companies and providing key financial mechanisms to increase access to livelihood opportunities for women and girls. 

Placing women’s economic empowerment at the center, this project will serve to tackle a key developmental barrier in the three selected countries of implementation and provide women with increased opportunities to stimulate development through the mechanism of inclusive business. 

The BCtA-AGFUND partnership envisaged to serve as a pilot for scaling-up under which similar activities would be undertaken across many of the region’s seven other developing countries. 

The Sustainable Development Goals are a set of 17 interconnected goals in a universal call for people, planet and prosperity. By 2030, the SDGs will address the world’s biggest issues like economic growth, poverty, inequality and climate change.