How private-public partnerships can amplify efforts to achieve SDGs
By Paula Pelaez, BCtA Programme Manager
 
The Sustainable Development Goals present a powerful universal framework to improve the lives of all the people on the planet. The goals provide ambitious targets across a range of themes, from women’s empowerment and climate change to reducing poverty. If they are achieved by their target year of 2030, we will have collectively succeeded in making the world a more equitable, stable and prosperous place.
 
While many of the SDGs represent the ‘what’ we will achieve – a reduction in poverty rates, improved gender equality, better access to quality healthcare and education – SDG 17 represents the ’how’. Without collaboration, ideas and skills sharing, and ‘sharing the load’, so to speak, individual actors striving to achieve any of the SDGs run the risk of operating in silos, becoming overburdened, and thus not being able to guarantee that their gains will be sustainable.
 
What SDG 17 does is open up opportunities for actors to have wider impact by working collaboratively with others, expanding reach, scale and influence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the private sector. Although not a traditional development actor, the potential for public-private partnerships to exponentially increase SDG impact is increasingly being recognised.
 

At the recent 72nd United Nations General Assembly, tapping into this potential was a recurrent theme. At an event co-hosted by UNDP, Business Call to Action and UN Global Compact, Business Solutions for the SDGs, leaders from prominent multinational companies like Ikea, Microsoft and Nutriset discussed with UN leadership the opportunities that more systematic SDG targeting in core business planning, including partnering with traditional development actors such as the UN, can bring. UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner pointed to the role that the UN can play in creating a more secure and supportive regulatory and policy environment for the private sector to engage.

“Much of what we do in our development support work with countries, governments and communities – but also in our relationship with business – is to de-risk development by getting the right public policies in place; by allowing technologies to be built in a labour market that has certain minimum capacities and skill sets; by influencing the kind of education and training programmes … that will allow [businesses] to step in earlier, faster, and at a larger scale,” said Mr. Steiner.

Conversely, traditional development actors such as the UN can learn from the private sector’s adaptive, innovate approach to meeting market demand, enabling development responses to be more flexible, demand driven, and therefore better matched to people’s needs. At Business Call to Action, a multilateral partnership between five donor countries and UNDP, we encourage companies to adopt inclusive business models, which means including low income earners in business value chains. In doing so, companies contribute to improving people’s lives by, for examples, providing better wages, access to market, improved infrastructure, better living conditions, and better quality and affordable essential goods, such as healthcare, energy, and education. Rather than following development actors’ methods of reaching SDG targets, these businesses are using their own tried and tested methods to reach and include their target populations.

For example, in Turkey, BCtA member Pınar Dairy accounts for 20 percent of total dairy exports. While industry peers source primarily from large farms, Pınar sees value in sourcing from small-scale farmers. Assisting over 6,000 dairy farmers over a 3-year period by providing training on animal health, feeding and sanitation, Pinar is helping to increase the productivity and incomes of its small-scale dairy farmers.

BCtA has 200+ member companies who are applying, or have applied, initiatives such as Pinar Dairy’s across 67 countries since 2008. BCtA supports its member companies to expand the impact and scale of their inclusive business initiatives in line with the SDGs. In this way, efforts under SDG 17 are actually bringing results towards other SDGS. The efforts of our members show that the willingness is there. According to a recent report, Better Business Better World, published by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission, 85 percent of businesses see cross-sector coalitions and partnerships as essential to accelerating the implementation of the SDGs.

The SDGs will only be achieved if they are embedded into both government policies and operations of all businesses; doing so requires strong and effective partnerships between the public and private sectors. Business needs development and development needs business.