Three answers to three questions on how inclusive business will help achieve SDGs
Daniel Spitzer and Teresa Law, CEO and CFO of Mountain Hazelnuts, Bhutan’s largest private-sector employer. Photograph: Business Call to Action
By Tom Huston
At the Business Call to Action’s annual forum, member companies gathered to discuss how inclusive business will help to realise the 17 sustainable development goals
Last month, representatives from government, major corporations, and the United Nations gathered in New York City to explore the efforts of inclusive businesses to meet the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) formally launched one year ago. The seventh annual Business Call to Action (BCtA) forum, which took place two blocks from the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, also marked the unveiling of 42 new commitments by 38 new inclusive businesses now aligned with BCtA.
Throughout a half day of panel sessions and informal dialogue, attendees compared notes on the ways in which inclusive businesses are delivering on the SDGs through their core business activities, striving to envision a clear path to success in 2030 - the stated deadline for achieving all 17 SDGs (and the 169 more specific target objectives between them).
But amid a palpable sense of optimism over the potential of inclusive businesses to play a key role in meeting the goals a few critical questions loomed:
Although the SDGs may be a helpful framework to focus the efforts of inclusive businesses, are there simply too many disparate goals?
Are the individual goals themselves too broadly aspirational to be pragmatically meaningful, as some sceptics have alleged?
And in the absence of universally agreed-upon metrics, how can for-profit businesses, NGOs, and governments effectively track, share, and coordinate their results?
Diverse problems, holistic solutions
Jayanth Bhuvaraghan, chief mission officer of the French eyeglass manufacturer Essilor, which aims to provide low-cost vision correction to 550 million underserved Indian citizens by 2030, spoke to each of these concerns in his opening keynote, setting the tone for the conversations that followed. Addressing the first point, he observed that “the SDGs are not a checklist, but a holistic framework. Focusing on certain global issues can help advance multiple SDGs.” In other words, because so many of the goals are interconnected, any given business shouldn’t spread itself thin trying to approach 17 separate problems, but should rather leverage its core competencies to focus on just one or two areas where it can have the biggest impact.
He cited the example of Essilor’s work in India, explaining that uncorrected poor vision is “the world’s largest disability” and therefore a fundamental obstacle to the fulfillment of all of the SDGs. “It affects 2.5 billion people worldwide,” he said, “and according to the WHO costs the global economy $227bn [£176bn] each year in lost productivity.” By helping adults to see, Bhuvaraghan said, millions more people will be empowered to perform the actions needed to help fulfill the 2030 agenda.
Idealists work better together
As for the charge that the SDGs may be too aspirational to be effectively addressed by the private sector in day-to-day business operations, many participants argued that SDG17 - “Partnerships for the Goals” - helps ensure that the remaining SDGs aren’t approached in nebulous terms. If the goals are openly discussed and made sufficiently concrete, the thinking goes, inclusive businesses can find financially compelling reasons to work with other organisations in support of the SDGs, creating win-win scenarios that combine mutually beneficial business growth with measurable results.
“You can’t do this yourself,” said Laura Gitman, VP of sustainability nonprofit BSR. “You need to collaborate with a variety of different partners, and it has to be true collaboration, a genuine partnership approach, which is critical to really scale.”
Toshio Takanashi, a senior executive of Japan’s Asahi Kasei Corporation, agreed: “I think the single most important factor to focus on is relationship.”
Yet establishing trust and commitment in a business relationship, as in a marriage, takes time and patience, remarked Teresa Law, co-founder and CFO of Bhutan’s largest private-sector employer, Mountain Hazelnuts. “I think you need to have patience,” she said, “that you’re not going to get a divorce, that you’re going to stick it out.”
Swedish telecom giant Ericsson’s senior vice president and chief sustainability officer Elaine Weidman-Grunewald said that by continuing to establish regional partnerships her company aims to address “affordability barriers” to internet access, finding ways to connect “half the planet” that still isn’t online. Such partnerships are not only key to Erisson’s core business objectives, she noted, but they also happen to align seamlessly with important SDGs.
“Life is a chain of relationships,” said Roger Schmid, manager of the New York Innovation Hub for the Brazilian beauty products manufacturer Natura. “So we need to increasingly understand and appreciate how everything is interrelated, that whatever we do touches everything else.”
Accounting for inclusive businesses’ impact
Toshio Takanashi, primary executive officer, Asahi Kasei Corporation, Adeline Lescanne-Gautier, general manager, Nutriset, Roger Schmid, Innovation Hub, Natura, and Laura Gitman, vice president, BSR. Photograph: Business Call to Action
As for the question of how inclusive businesses can adequately monitor and measure their overall progress in the effort to fulfill the SDGs, BCtA debuted a new report at the conference that aims to address such concerns head on. Produced in partnership with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the report is titled Measuring Impact: How Business Accelerates the Sustainable Development Goals (pdf) and illuminates the role that businesses already play in recording - and sharing with governmental agencies - a wide range of sustainability and impact metrics pertaining directly to the SDGs.
The report concludes that in an increasingly interconnected world, the small and large businesses (for-profit and non-) of the private sector are poised to effect transnational objectives in ways that local governments can’t pursue alone.
Magdy Martínez-Solimán, assistant administrator and director of the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (BPPS), UNDP, reminded the BCtA Forum why their work is essential in implementing the SDGs: “What makes inclusive business truly transformative is that it is driven by innovation. It is driven by market opportunities, but it seeks to target the people that most need to be included in the economy. It is driven by genuine and collective efforts to build a vibrant economy that all can benefit from, thus contributing to the achievement of the 2030 agenda—an agenda that pledges to leave no one behind.”
Content on this page is provided by Business Call to Action, and originally appeared on the The Guardian Business and the Sustainable Development Goals Hub.