Companies need to adopt sustainable development in the core of their business operations in order to help realize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as remain competitive in the years to come. The SDGs are a global call to action directed towards alleviating poverty, safeguarding the planet, and guaranteeing better quality of life for all; Each individual and corporate institution has a role to play to help in accomplishing these.
With just 10 years to go to the time that the SDGs are predestined to be fully achieved, there is a need for organizations to chart their paths to more sustainable trade and business operations by clearly comprehending their role in diverse sustainability initiatives and as such embedding the sustainability agenda in the DNA of their day-to-day operations. Adopting sustainable development in an organization means strengthening the organisation’s capacity in designing and implementing practices that are centered around promoting structural economic transformation, not just for their institutions, but also for the sake of their countries and the world at large. Sustainable development also means focusing on the different roles of multi-stakeholder partnerships and coalescing them together, then finding ways of implementing them.
Organisations can achieve this by bringing together business people, researchers and standards organizations in sustainable value chains and voluntary sustainability standards to harness in their expertise of sustainability. An initiative like the Africa Sustainability Matters that is led by the sustainability evangelist Edward Mungai has over the years been helping organisations all over Africa embed sustainable development in their growth strategies.
This is achieved by provide expert advice and guidance on how to tow the sustainability line. Africa Sustainability Matters and other allied institutions can go a long way in helping organisations re-evaluate their sustainability standards and enable them to analyse standards-related data and self-assess their sustainability-related performance. Going by the gospel of sustainability evangelists like Edward Mungai, sustainability trends provide companies with a broader access to information on sustainable practices, trade and markets.
Equally, the companies can make available information to their clients who are also pro-sustainable development. Sustainable development therefore remains to be the only way that companies can be guaranteed future survival, and adopting this agenda early enough remains to be of equal importance.
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A redacted version of this article was published on The Standard by the same author