SDG 17: Connected to action, connected with passion

Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals created by the United Nations in consultation with other international and national actors such as governments, companies and NGOs. These are universal goals that would help fight the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges our world is facing. These sustainable development goals are based on five major cross-cutting issues, which are the following: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership.

Both sustainability and responsibility are today used as strategies to win right by increasing organisation legitimacy and performance. Sustainability considers two major things: The type of society we want to create ; and the models and systems that support a better world. This is possible especially with the principal SDG we are focusing on: SDG 17 Partnerships for the goals. The one is particularly important for global sustainability in a way that it is a part of the process to reach the other sustainable development goals. The collaboration and partnership between firms, organizations, governments, or any other actor is key to successful, efficient and sustainable changes in our today’s world. Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development can be fulfilled with actions on certain aspects: Finance, Technology, Capacity building, Systemic issues, Multi-stakeholder partnerships and Data, monitoring and accountability.

Thanks to their huge financial power, the support of governments appears as a necessity to reach SDG 17. We can see it with the example of the European Union. In fact, The EU supports country-led development through a range of financial support mechanisms
In 2015, in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, all countries recognized that international public finance plays an important role in complementing countries’ domestic efforts to mobilize public resources, especially in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. Official development assistance (ODA), other official flows (OOFs), private flows, such as foreign direct investment (FDI), grants by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and officially supported export credits are some of the financial flows from the EU and its Member States to developing countries.

There has been a positive trend regarding the total volume of financial flows from the EU to developing countries over the past two decades. The OECD estimates that total public and private EU financing to developing countries amounted to EUR 131.4 billion in 2019. This is more than two times the amount the EU provided in 2004.

The world today is more interconnected than ever before, in part due to digital technology. The  SDGs can only be realized with a strong commitment to global partnership and cooperation. Coordinating policies to help developing countries, particularly least—developed countries, is vital to achieving sustainable growth and development. This includes supporting these countries in managing their finances, including debt, as well as promoting investment. The EU has long been committed to global partnership by supporting developing countries through official development assistance. Over the past decade, there has been a shift in the balance of roles, from donor—recipient towards cooperation based on a more equal partnership.

The EU has been strongly involved in processes such as the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, which promotes country ownership, transparency and results, among other principles. However, to help others, the EU also has to ensure its own financial stability and make efforts to support good financial governance in its Member States. Many of the SDGs can only be reached on the basis of strong technological development, in particular in the digital sphere. Indeed, communication with everyone, at every place, at every time, is crucial in our current world of infinite growing changes, and challenges to face.

Huge challenge on its own, SDG 17 also represents a significant help to increase the development of others sustainable goals, such as, concerning our companies; decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12) and climate action (SDG 13). Indeed, partnership between companies of different industry sector and region promote sustainability and growth.

How could small or emerging companies act in a sustainable way while growing economically without any external support? To build a sustainable world, people must act from the true beginning of the project. Implementing sustainable development in so many minds and company values that they will build their business around it.

How does companies succeed in collaborating with others, what are their challenges, obstacles, strategies and progresses to make? That is what we are trying to analyze in this essay.

Description and comparison of the stories

In this project our group has had the opportunity to learn  and deepen more on our specific  SDG  which is SDG17. This SDG could be summarized as a wrap—up one for the rest of 16 SDGs as it focuses on the mutual collaboration of all countries in order to achieve the development goals but from a more financial point of view because The Global Goals can only be met if we  work together. Hence, our stories, despite focusing on different specific actions, all share a common element: implementing them in a collaborative manner seeking for international financial or economic collaboration and support.

International investments and support are needed to ensure innovative technological development, fair trade and market access, especially for developing countries. So to build a      better  world, we need to be supportive, empathetic, inventive, passionate, and above all, cooperative. This SDG has 19 targets, one of the examples are, mobilize resources to improve domestic revenue collection, enhance SDG capacity in developing countries, and further develop measurements of progress. One of the ways to support this is to exports by buying products from developing countries. Pay attention to the Fair—Trade label on products which helps to indicate products from local producers in developing countries. Although all  of stories  address these from divergent perspectives, they are converging in some aspects that we find remarkable.

Our stories are varied and address several SDGs, but they all converge in the partnership goal. If we analyze the continent where the companies are originated, we can easily realize that America leads this specific “flourishing” project with 14 stories followed by Europe which has 7 stories. Africa and Asia come last with 1 and 3 enterprise stories respectively but still are making a great impact with some projects like IBK Co-op Financing in Seoul, committed to raise funds to aid SMEs to solve their early years financial problems or Kytabu educational project in Nairobi willing to provide better education for Kenyans by making students books more accessible for them.

These numbers demonstrate two facts, On the one hand, they reflect how developed countries are committed to making a better world leading flourishing projects and pursuing to satisfy human basic needs such as the case of Needlists which helps developing countries providing them with humanitarian help wheeler there are natural disasters, which is clearly implementing the 17.3 target of our SDG. On the other hand, this also proving that developing countries are feeling increasingly moved to take action and are engaging more and more to target the UN set goals.

Among all the enterprises, it is also remarkable to point that the great majority are corporations (17) followed by partnerships (4) and b-corps (4) reflecting how shareholders are raising awareness on their real impact and responsibility wanting to commit themselves into this global project.

The sectors in which the enterprises operate are wide and varied. Some are non-classic consultancy companies such as Cirklo which helps worldwide NGOs line up with SDGs to take a step further and expand their business potential; others like CEMEX are fighting to achieve worlwide sustainable housing contributing to reduce the environmental harm and improving poor people housing quality; and other marketing business such as Global Prairie working to support committed clients willing to make the world a better place by having a positive social impact.

In addition, there are still some other companies with a more environmental mindset that impact positively both the environment and their inhabitants such as South Pole which employees local communities in environmental projects or OLIO, which reduces food waste by connecting communities and allowing them to share the food as to eliminate hunger.

Furthermore, there are some other businesses, that we find specifically interesting. Such is the case of Clarity Initiative. We chose the company because it covers the 5Ps of sustainable goals, in particular, people and peace. The inspiration of this company comes when its founder Hitzel, after being a victim of domestic violence, turned her past trauma to help other people, The effects of her personal situation prompted her to start Clarity. When she was at the lowest point in her life, she tried to seek help through coaches to get out of that difficult phase because she did not have any family support since she lived in Canada, far from her family in Mexico. However, she felt that she was paying for the sessions for no reason, as the sessions she resorted to did not fully satisfy her. Clarity offers coaching an training services to make an impact because they believe every human being is here to contribute, not to be a victim. Sadly, not all people have access to pay an inclusive and high-quality coaching service, so Clarity provides their most vulnerable customers to only pay 10% of their normal fee. Young people, people with disabilities, women, Indigenous and black communities who do not have access to a high-quality paid coaching service are the main beneficiaries of Clarity.

Another company that is interesting for us is Hello Science in the 5ps of sustainable goals this company cover the people, prosperity, planet and partnerships. This innovation was established by Novozymes to foster a collaborative approach of the SDGs, with technology and knowledge freely shared to solve huge problems. Through its platform, this innovation has generated ideas to assist in the development of a clean water system in the Bangalore area.  In exchange, Hello Science has provided technology and experienced business advice to six collaborators who have offered viable solutions to the water challenges. This is the innovation’s immediate impact. With this initiative, places around the world have gained access to clean water systems and information on wastewater management which in the end has benefited these communities.

As all our enterprises approach the SDGs following different business models and sectors, we have made a table to generally classify what field are they positively improving:

—Financial Sector: providing financial aid or economical resources and management

—Technological Sector: providing tech services, software telecommunication.

—Food/resources companies: includes both basic needs such as water to energy or other natural resources.

—Consumption companies: from retailing and manufacturing to transportation.

—Other companies: consultants and climate change oriented companies

As SDG 17 is tightly connected and related to the other SDG we wanted to reflect those connections in a more visual approach doing a mind map. The vectors connect our SDG with the others being SDG 8, 9, 12 and 13 the most common in the stories. Each vector has a number assigned reflecting how many of the enterprises addresses that particular SDG. We can then conclude that, above all, decent work and economic growth,  industry  and innovative infrastructure, responsible consumption and production and climate action are the most repeated actions.

Transforming Mindsets

Collaborating with cross cultural teammates is definitely a fun challenge to have considering how different our mindsets are! This is reflected through our assessment from the Sustainable Mindset Institute on four dimensions namely: Ecology, System, Emotional Intelligence, and Spiritual Intelligence.

The assessment result was widely diverse, some peers are action driven while others are cognitive driven on certain aspects.

Nevertheless, we succeeded in finishing the engagement and learned from each other. We learned how companies can utilize their capabilities to bring impact to the society, and how we can develop a sustainable mindset as future leaders.

Companies can use their key resources to realize SDGs—driven action. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a 2030 agenda joined by all countries to improve education, banish poverty, and so forth. Companies are deeply encouraged to participate through adopting a 5Ps mindset (profit, people, planet).

Instead of realizing the traditional mindset (which company focuses on profit only), the 3Ps mindset is focusing on society contribution through strategic actions, and key stakeholders engagement.

1. We all agree on the fact that, if working with classmates with whom we do not have much relationship can already be a challenge, having to carry out a job like this, with continuous communication and face-to-face calls, with people who not, only do not know, but who live in a place that completely clashes with ours, since Asia and Europe have very different cultures, it is even much more complicated, becoming a bit scary at first.
2. In addition, for the work to go well, we felt it was necessary to avoid simple misunderstandings based on cultural differences, as well as the time difference that has forced us to devise “a time range” – as we have decided to call it to make our communication effective and understand each other as if we were talking to colleagues with whom we have been working all our lives.Thus, we have been looking for the necessary tools to facilitate ourselves all the work that we had ahead, but above all, to develop our ability to relate to people who live and get used to a completely different reality.
3. Regarding academic knowledge, we consider that it has been incredible to be able to enrich ourselves with the comments and the point of view provided by those who live in a completely different continent. The criteria of each one of the members of the group has matured from session  to session and this would not have been possible if it had not been for the open—mindedness that launching such a project has given us, in addition to the tolerance and sense of admiration with which we all communicated.

It is worth mentioning that we have been lucky enough to meet nice, hard-working and committed people, who have  not  only helped us to fulfill our work and the established deadlines, but have also made our responsibilities stop from being a position or indeed, a responsibility, to become a friendly time that we have shared between Asians and Europeans, where we have even grown fond of each other and between hours and hours of work, we have proposed occasional invitations, one to the other others, to see each other’s faces one day.

We believe that this is the result of trying to carry out a job with great enthusiasm, thinking about how to make each other feel comfortable and being very receptive to listening, understanding and learning from so much that others have to teach us.

Critical Reflection Essay

Sustainability and SDG Landscape

As said, the SDG our group is focused into is number 17: Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development. Although the SDGS were adopted in 2015, the recent changes in the world, such as the pandemic and the recent war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine, have made us realize the importance of cooperations between countries in order to recover from all of these events and be able to achieve sustainable development for the generations to come. As said in the meetings between the group, SDG 17 is the connection between all the others, the other sustainable targets can only be achieved if we count with strong global cooperation and partnerships. Because we live in a globalized world where information is communicated in the quickest way possible, the use of technology to achieve cooperation is essential. Although most populations can have access to the Internet, the digital divide in some developing countries persists, making communication and partnerships difficult with the population that needs it the most. For example, due to COVID-19, the UN created a portal to provide a space for the global community to share actions and guidance to ensure information about science, solidarity and solutions, where the goal was to save lives, promote local and global cooperation and advocate for support to impacted populations. As it is said, SDG 17 helps to combine other sustainable goals and is a way to make them possible in real terms.

Next Steps Action Plans

Where do you go from here?

It is time for us to take part in SDG number 17, to revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development, we can help in many ways, from something so simple as using social media as in our everyday life to making citizen petitions to our government

1. IN OUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

As citizens, we should be able to seek for problems in our local community and create a solution for it, as the AIM2Flourish companies. All ideas are good ideas. The goal should be to mobilize action in the implementation of SDGs in our everyday life.

2. WITH HELP OF THE GOVERNMENT

Create a citizen petition to the  government so they take action in the implementation of SDGs in companies. On the other hand, they should encourage companies by facilitating their sustainability with reduction of taxes and other forms of financial aid.

3. IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Create a social media account for people to be more accessible to problems and ways they can help. Technology is vital for SDG 17! Partnership with influencers in social media to speak up about sustainable companies and make them visible.

Multicultural teamwork experience

“We feel more comfortable with each other”

“We feel like classmates.”

“We did a “goodbye” meeting”

“We find the experience fun”

Working in collaboration with people from different countries, with sometimes different thinking and working methods, even more on such a current and important subject, is a real added value for our studies and future working life. At the beginning, it was tough. Language Seems to be our barrier. At the end; we wanna know each other, we propose to meet in person! Now it’s nothing but an activity we really wanna do, we look forward to have a zoom meeting with the group! This helps us to break our prejudice. Really the experience, in the end, was made to feel like something’ natural”, like a work that arises from relationships and almost friendship between people who would not have met if it had not been for this. We all agree that this experience has been positive and enriching for everyone. Nevertheless at first, it was not an easy task to append. Indeed, we worried about cultural barriers, or different working methods according to our personal habits. Then, it was a new way of learning and studying for each member of the group. We were wondering how this experience will go on and worried about the motivation of everyone. However , all the members of the group were open-minded, motivated and responsive since the beginning of the work. We rapidly felt like classmates, happy to see and talk with each other every week, to work on the project together as well as catch up on everyone’s news. Depending on everyone’s unexpected events, we were able to adapt our time meetings and be comprehensive to each situation. Over time, we established real relationships, had fun while working the project, and proposed to every member to meet in person if we will go to each other’s country. The group work became nothing but an activity we really wanted to do, which led to an additional wrap-up meeting, allowing us to close our collaboration in a more personal way.

As it is commonly said, humans are a species of habits. We like doing what we are used to do and we feel uncomfortable when facing new challenges. However this enriching experience make us broke prejudices we could have before, get out of our comfort zone, share our opinions and reach a common point to create our report.

In the end, it does not matter where we come from and our social/cultural background, when working on a team, the most important thing is to be patient and understanding as well as our personal values. Working in this group made us realize this and we really enjoyed the experience and this way of learning by being inspired by such heartening companies.

References

Articles – ten key cross-cultural management skills. CMT (n.d). Retrieved April 3, 2022 from http://cmct.net/articles_ten_key_skills.html

Homepage. The Global Goals.(2022, March 17). Retrieved April 3, 2022, from http://www.globaleoals.ore/

LonEiond io, C. (2021) Session 1, Global Sustainability issues, Rennes School of Business

SDG 17 – partnerships for the goals. SDG 17 – Partnershos for the goa Is – Statistics Explained. (n.d.). Retrieved Agril 3, 2022, from ht@s://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php?titIe=SDG 17 – Partnershigs for the Eioa Is#Pa rtnershig for the EioaIs in the EU: overview and key’ trends