New Tool Alert For Sustainable Development Goals

With 10 years left to meet the deadline of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, a new web-based impact management solution for the global business community launches in Kenya on March 18th. The SDG Action Manager empowers companies of all sizes, anywhere in the world, to take meaningful action and track their progress on the Global Goals.

Developed by B Lab and the UN Global Compact, the SDG Action Manager brings together B Lab’s B Impact Assessment, the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact and the Sustainable Development Goals, to enable businesses to take meaningful action on the SDGs through 2030.

Speaking of the SDG Action Manager, Judy Njino, Executive Director, Global Compact Network Kenya said: “The Decade of Delivery for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), requires bold action from business on a scale we’ve never seen before. This will call for all business leaders to set radical goals and establish a “new normal” for doing business.”

She added that every individual effort from large and small businesses alike will count in helping realize our collective goal and that to bridge the gap between commitment and action, the SDG Action Manager is available to all companies to self assess, benchmark and improve their sustainability performance aligned with the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact and the Global Goals.

According to Ngwing Kimani, Executive Director, B Lab East Africa, “There are companies who are already taking action but have no uniform way to measure their progress and therefore find it difficult to determine whether their actions are having any positive effect. There are companies who want to take action and are wondering how to do so. Then there are those who are taking action, measuring and improving but no one knows about them. This tool is important because it provides a platform to select specific goals, establish a baseline starting point, measure progress and learn from peers.”

Questions within the tool are tailored to a company based on their size, sector, and geographic market. This enables a company to not only carry out self-assessment, but also benchmark their performance, and identify relevant SDGs where they are meeting the set target and where they are behind set targets.

The SDG Action Manager is free to access by companies and is informed by the work and feedback from a range of stakeholders, including experts in corporate sustainability, civil society, the UN, and academia. It is inspired by the Certified B Corporation community and participating companies of the UN Global Compact.

It was developed with generous support from the following funding partners: The UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Generation Foundation, Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Emmanuel Faber as an individual donor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation.