Sustainable Development Goals

Social Entrepreneurship: Building a Better World Through Food

Photo by Erin Ng Photography

This article will describe five social enterprises that provide food and cultural opportunities to customers while employees have a chance to gain valuable experiences, fair wages, and benefits.

Scampia, Italy – The aroma of Italian-Romanian Roma cuisine wafts through a theater in a crime-ridden neighborhood. Before the show, people line up

Fairer Economies: What are the challenges in making economies more sustainable?

  • The world has made strides on reducing inequality and increasing life expectancy and access to healthcare and education, but we’re off track to end extreme poverty by 2030.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to widen inequalities and have a severe impact on our ability to meet the SDGs.
  • The Great Reset is an

What are the challenges in making technology more sustainable?

  • Technology can accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals – or exacerbate inequalities.
  • Responsible technology governance can help ensure innovation is inclusive.
  • More work needs to be done to provide universal and affordable access to the internet and close the digital skills gap.

Technological innovation…it’s complicated.

On the one hand,

SDG17: How to partner in pursuit of sustainability

SDG17 calls on businesses and governments to actively partner in order to deliver sustainable development goals, but doing so is easier said than done.

There are many parts of SDG 17 – such as the sections on trade rules, aid, and systemic issues – where companies can have only limited influence, given they are

Think Holistically About Sustainability — It’s Much More Than Climate

While many people think sustainability is about green policies, that is only part of the story, says VMware Vice President, Sustainability Strategy Nicola Acutt.  “Our view is holistic and inclusive of sustainability for people and the planet.”

Indeed, Acutt says VMware frames its definition of sustainability around three ideas: people, planet and product. “For us, sustainability

How the Sustainable Development Goals can help cities focus COVID-19 recovery

rior to COVID-19, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were gaining traction among local governments and city leaders as a framework to focus local policy on ambitious targets around inclusion, equity, and sustainability. Several cities published reports of their local progress on the SDGs in Voluntary Local Reviews (VLR), echoing the official format used by countries

Financing, technology, sustainability and data to reduce the gender gap

2020 is a crucial year for women and girls, everywhere. We celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. It also marks the five-year milestone of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s 64th Commission

Impact: The New Narrative For Long-Term Business Growth

When all the UN Member States adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, this marked the beginning of a journey aiming to unite all actors under the same umbrella in driving an equitable future for all, enabling thriving economies and living in harmony with the environment.

Ever since, sustainability has started to

With great wealth comes great responsibility

n 1971, the German business professor Klaus Schwab brought leading executives from Western Europe to a small town in the Swiss Alps. Schwab asked these corporate leaders to consider the impact of their businesses on all of their stakeholders – not just customers and investors, but the societies within their sphere of influence. This ethos

Sustainable finance starts with data

  • Where disclosure and data exist, there tends to be record levels of sustainable investing.
  • Financial products related to the Sustainable Development Goals can only be developed once fundamental data is available across companies.
  • Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data should be treated as fundamental rather than alternative data.

Businesses today face

How to Invest for Market-Rate Return and Measurable Impact at Large Scale

Impact investing is a specific approach of “investing for the common good” alongside ethical investing, sustainable investing, socially responsible investing (SRI), and environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing. Although they are often grouped together in everyday conversation and media coverage, there are different methodologies associated with each of these approaches.

The Global Impact Investors Network (GIIN)

Why Social Impact is a C-Suite Issue

Solving the most pressing issues of our time has a colossal price tag. Today, the global impact investing market has reached $502 billion – which is excellent – but that’s nowhere near the $5 to $7 trillion that’s needed to achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals over the coming decade. Whether it’s feeding the 

More than half of the world’s poor are children

As global leaders prepare to discuss progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals at the U.N. High Level Policy Forum (HLPF) in early July, the holy grail of the agenda—eradicating extreme poverty—may well seem elusive and complex. On the one hand, there is much to celebrate: Since 2016, according to the World Poverty Clock,

How to Deploy Tech Solutions to the World’s Greatest Challenges at Scale

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” argued Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th century US lecturer, philosopher, and essayist. In other words, if scientists and engineers invent a better solution to something, scaling and deployment will happen automatically.

Although Emerson was writing in the 19th century, we are still

Major funds launch toolkit to help investors measure SDG impact

Cambridge University’s Investment Leaders Group has developed a framework that allows investors to measure the impact of their investments against the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Investment Leaders Group (ILG), a global network of pension funds, insurers and asset managers convened by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), has created a dashboard, called the Cambridge Impact

The New Era of Refugee Investing

More than three years into the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), not one country is on track to achieve them by the 2030 deadline. This conclusion, reached in a recent Brookings Institution report, highlights the enormous human costs associated with not meeting these goals, and implores countries to do more. With heads of

Three Community Feedback Tools for Impact Investors

Successful businesses continuously update their knowledge of what customers want.  Walmart collects more than 2.5 million gigabytes of customer data per hour and Yelp users post 26,380 reviews per minute. So why do many impact investors, who seek social, environmental, and economic returns on patient timelines, park customer insight at the door when they want to achieve multiple

How to Create the Conditions for Social Intrapreneurs to Thrive

“We are past, ‘Should we?’ The question now is, ‘How?’” At a recent event in New York, New York, Mehmood Kahn, chief scientific officer at Pepsico, framed the challenge on the mind of many company leaders who have committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In other words, the ambition is set, but how will companies deliver?

The

How Can Countries Reduce Poverty Faster?

Can the world end poverty by 2030, the target set by the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development? The UN General Assembly recently reaffirmed this deadline but conceded that meeting it will require “accelerating global actions” to tackle poverty’s causes. As the international community explores new solutions, lessons

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