Business and the Millennium Development Goals – Where

Business and the Millennium Development Goals – Where’s it all heading?

September 29 2010

by CCB team

At the start of the new millennium, world leaders gathered at the UN to make a promise to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Eight goals were agreed that focus on important issues such as increasing the number of children in school, improving healthcare, cutting maternal and child deaths, expanding access to clean water, combating major diseases and reducing environmental degradation. The eighth and final goal speaks to the role of the private sector in delivering this progress by calling for a global partnership for development.

With only five years to go until the 2015 deadline, progress remains patchy and uneven; commitment and confidence from governments, development agencies and corporations equally so. There is clearly a need to take stock, as demonstrated by the United Nation’s meeting in New York during September, to ‘accelerate the progress’ of the MDG’s.

As long ago as 2007, Gordon Brown and UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon signed up over 60 CEOs of leading global corporations to the ‘Business Call to Action’. This call committed companies to supporting the MDGs through their mainstream activities. Three years on, the question remains, beyond this hearty but rather vague commitment, how can companies relate these developmental goals to their business in a way that is meaningful and relevant?

Many of the signatories of the Business Call to Action – companies such as Diageo, Vodafone, Unilever, PepsiCo, Cadbury, Kraft and Google – are busy measuring, monitoring and grappling with the daily implications of what this means; targets for reducing carbon emissions, strategies for recycling packaging, commitments to responsible marketing, goals for reducing overtime in factories, new products and technologies that can reach the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.

As generators of wealth, jobs, innovation, products and services, it is against these indicators that businesses should be measuring their contributions. The role played by social investment and philanthropy is important too. It is in this latter area that many companies feel more able to demonstrate their efforts towards the MDGs – by building water wells, supporting educational programmes, donating drugs and mosquito nets.

However, it should not be forgotten that there exists a need to address the less positive impacts of business, the impacts that offset or hinder progress: poor labour standards in the supply chain, irresponsible extraction/use of natural resources, drug prices that put essential medicines out of reach for the poor, pollution, waste etc. In assessing the true value of corporate efforts, therefore, fundamental questions must be asked: creating jobs? Good – but are they jobs that pay a fair wage and don’t endanger the worker’s life? Creating products and markets? Great – but are they accessible to all those who need them? Paying taxes? Quite right – but what about tax havens and transfer pricing?

So where does that leave businesses that have signed up to the Business Call but don’t quite know how to measure and articulate the commitment that their CEOs have signed them up for?

A comprehensive framework developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) offers guidance to companies aligned to three areas: core business operations, social investment and philanthropy, and public advocacy and dialogue. The framework offers useful examples and indicators of what companies could or should do to address each of the eight goals.

It is a useful contribution to the debate on what business can contribute and removes one less excuse for inaction. The key challenges now, will be translating frameworks and good intentions into practical action, and identifying simple and key measures to demonstrate impacts in a meaningful way. If companies fail to do this, NGOs and development activists will be gearing up to measure their progress for them. When those signatories of the Business Call to Action were asked in September what they had done since July 2007, they should have been ready with a substantive response. But more importantly, so too should the governments on whom the primary duty for delivering the MDG’s falls.

Liza is an Associate Director at Corporate Citizenship. She manages both supply chain and broader strategy work for clients. Prior to joining CC, Liza was private sector policy advisor for Save the Children, where she sat on the Board of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). She retains close relationships with the development world and NGOs. Liza speaks fluent Mandarin.