Business and the Millennium Development Goals - What’s your role?
Added on November 14, 2008
Ten years ago, if you mentioned the words ‘development’ or ‘human rights’ to the average business leader, you’d get a response that tended towards a variant of “it’s not our job, it’s government’s”. Today, these two words, whilst still eliciting wary responses, have now worked their way into the corporate language of those with global footprints and public commitments to being responsible corporate citizens. Which, when it comes to the Millennium Development Goals, is a good thing, because there is clearly a role, and an expectation, for them to do their bit.
At the start of the new millennium, world leaders gathered at the UN to make a promise to halve extreme poverty by 2015. A set of 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, 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.
Earlier this year, a high profile gathering of donors, government and business in New York marked the half-way point towards 2015. While there have been glimmers of progress in corners of the world, overall prospects for meeting the targets are gloomy - made doubly so by a collapsing financial system and rising commodity prices. Governments, as primary duty bearer will take the heat for much of this, but the role of business is in the spotlight too.
Last year, Gordon Brown and UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon signed up over 60 CEOs of leading global businesses to the ‘Business Call to Action’. This commits their businesses to supporting the MDGs through their corporate activities. The question remains, beyond this hearty but rather vague commitment, how can, or should, companies relate these developmental goals to their business in a way that are meaningful or make sense?
Many of the signatories of the Business Call to Action - amongst them, companies such as Diageo, Vodafone, Unilever, PepsiCo, Cadbury, Kraft and Google – have already adopted the language and practice of responsible business and are busy measuring, monitoring and grappling with the daily implications of what that 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’.. Asking business to explain how they are delivering directly against the 8 Development Goals is clearly impractical.
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 – by building water wells, supporting educational programmes, donating drugs and mosquito nets.
All well and good, but equally, 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 remain inaccessible to 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 all those tax havens?
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?
Progress towards ‘housing’ and supporting collective corporate responses to the MDGs are underway. 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 for each of the eight goals, of what companies could or should do.
It is a useful contribution to the debate on what business can contribute and removes one less excuse for inaction. It should also offer inspiration for those casting around for ways to strengthen existing efforts. The key challenges now, will be translating good intentions into practical action, and identifying simple and key measures to measure 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 in their stead. When those signatories of the Business Call to Action are asked what they’ve done since July 2007, they should be ready with a substantive response.
For more information on how we’re helping companies think about the MDGs, please contact Liza Lort-Phillips, Associate Director, Corporate Citizenship: