The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) platform: advancing businesses action towards the SDGs
Programs and partnerships
Lead institution(s)
Summary
There is a major gap between available financial resources and the funding that is needed to eliminate poverty and protect the planet by 2030.Read more
There is a major gap between available financial resources and the funding that is needed to eliminate poverty and protect the planet by 2030. With constrained public and aid budgets, there is growing pressure on the private sector to play a more relevant role towards sustainable development. This can only be achieved if private companies and investors promote decent job creation, better opportunities for women, and environmental resilience and protection.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an opportunity for businesses to rethink approaches to sustainable value creation. However, companies lack a roadmap to integrate the goals into their planning to make meaningful impacts. This project will help build the first publicly-available online management platform for companies to create and implement tangible action plans to manage, measure, and improve their performance on the SDGs. At least 10,000 businesses are expected to deliver on the global development agenda, making significant contributions to global goals such as gender equality, climate action, decent work, and poverty reduction.
The platform will generate rich data to develop evidence of the role of business and the SDGs. This data will be made available through an open-access database. The project includes a call for proposals to engage researchers from the Global South to use the database and to build a foundational body of evidence.
This initiative will be implemented jointly by Sistema B, a group of Latin American businesses working towards economic and environmental sustainability through their business practices; B Lab, a US-based non-profit that certifies organizations trying to reach this goal; and the United Nations Global Compact, which encourages businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies and to report on their implementation. It will be supported by the UK Department for International Development, the Skoll Foundation, and IDRC.
Research outputs
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This article studies the role of business in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16) - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions - to explore the processes and practices of peacebuilding and the impact on achieving the targets of SDG 16. In particular, we study an extreme context of post-conflict entrepreneurship. We study entrepreneurial ventures where ex-combatants seek to create economic opportunities and challenge the status quo of poverty and inequality in their rural communities. We develop several qualitative case studies of ex-combatant entrepreneurship to identify the activities that enable them to promote and consolidate peace while managing their businesses. We find that these ex-combatant ventures contribute to SDG 16 and identify a matrix of stakeholder engagement for organizing the variety of multi-stakeholder arrangements required of both venture success and peacebuilding efforts.
Despite the urgency to achieve sustainable objectives, institutional actors and private organizations do not share a guidance on which SDGs have to be in the agenda of companies. The project aims to analyze B Corps’ SDGs strategies in order to highlight how B Corps contribute to achieving SDGs and how they differ in their strategies depending on the social and environmental threats occurring in the countries and industries in which they are operating. To do this, a comparative analysis is carried out between developed “north” countries’ B Corps, and developing “south” countries’ B Corps, in order to provide dedicated policy implications of social and entrepreneurial relevance.