Report on Advancing Public-Private Partnerships to Achieve the Global Nutrition Goals

Official Report from USCIB Nutrition Event Now Published

Wilton Park USA, in partnership with the USCIB Foundation and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), has published a report as follow up to last October’s successful joint dialogue on “No More Missed Opportunities: Advancing Public-Private Partnerships to Achieve the Global Nutrition Goals.” The report summarizes the details of the meeting as well as the “Principles of Engagement,” which were developed during the meeting to provide a useful framework through which to approach future public-private partnership and a valuable reference point for developing effective solutions.

The report concludes that “effective partnerships and better nutrition outcomes can be facilitated through policy and legislative frameworks more conducive to collaboration. This could include better application of the clout of financiers, shareholders, and consumers on the business side and constituencies, NGOs, and civil servants on the government side.”

“Every country is now struggling with some aspect of malnutrition, and a growing number are experiencing both undernutrition and obesity,” said USCIB Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener, who leads USCIB’s policy work on nutrition, food and health. “The roundtable sought to support the accelerated achievement of internationally agreed global nutrition goals, and broader commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), by convening a high-level group of leaders from government, business and other key stakeholders.”

This meeting aimed to tackle the problem of poor diet as the number one risk factor for early death, contributing to 20 percent of global deaths, with the burden falling disproportionately on children under five and women of reproductive age, a situation nutrition experts have described as a “missed opportunity” (Lancet, 2013). Each year, malnutrition is a factor in almost half of the six million deaths of children under five, and 159 million children are stunted, with impacts on their physical and cognitive abilities that last a lifetime. More than 500 million women are anemic, with an increased risk of maternal death and delivering premature and low-birth-weight babies. At the same time, 600 million adults are obese, and 420 million have diabetes, with rates rising steeply.

Read the full report here.

A Business Case for the SDGs

Using Data to Encourage Support for the Sustainable Development Goals

As 2030 approaches, many companies are creating innovative ways to track progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while others are encouraging the transformation of the SDGs from a corporate social responsibility sector to an integral business process which can impact savings and returns.

Bechtel Corporation has gone a step further by developing a textual analytics framework to use data and metrics that can advance the business case for the SDGs. This framework would help a company transform their SDG practices from their corporate social responsibility and public relations departments into an instrumental aspect of their business practices.

Bechtel’s Global Head of Sustainability Tam Nguyen and his colleague Michael Yamoah, manager of sustainability insights and analytics, have recently written an article in EnvironmentGuru in which they present a case study highlighting the framework process using textual analytics to match business indicators with voluntary national review indicators to highlight different areas for potential project opportunities and risks related to the SDGs. The article goes into detail about the case study by discussing the challenge and approach and noted four key steps to developing the business case for the SDGs.

The new article follows an earlier blog post on June 20, 2017 about Bechtel’s approach to using metrics to advance the SDGs. The blog post focused on how using metrics to study the relationship between the SDGs and corporations would encourage innovation in business to effectively merge the SDGs into business practices.

During last year’s UN General Assembly (UNGA), USCIB organized a  Business Experts Roundtable on Data Analytics for SDGs. At the event, Bechtel presented this framework to encourage companies to shift from SDG reporting to developing a business strategy that consolidates SDGs into the entire business process. 

Bechtel’s innovative framework can help other companies achieve the SDGs and help to push the 2030 agenda forward for all people. The framework can allow businesses to help their bottom line by impacting their savings or returns through further innovation with the SDGs. Encouraging companies to adopt the SDGs into their business practices is not just good for all, but also good business.

Read more on the case study in the original article here.

How Financial Inclusion Can Move People Out of Poverty

Guest post by Nina Nieuwoudt
Global Product Development: New Consumers
Mastercard
Originally Published on LinkedIn on October 30, 2017

Around the world this week, governments, multilaterals, and companies are coming together to celebrate Financial Inclusion Week. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the progress that we’ve made in extending financial access to un-banked and underbanked communities, and also a time to take honest stock of how far we still have to go. As Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer Michael Miebach noted following his speech at Money20/20 last week – we’re making progress, but at our current pace we won’t achieve full financial inclusion for another 200 years. Needless to say, we’ve got work to do.

The theme of this year’s Financial Inclusion Week is how new products and partnerships can enable financial inclusion. At Mastercard, this topic is close to our hearts. We believe that cross-sector partnerships are key to extending access to consumers at the base of the pyramid and building products that truly improve their lives.

To be clear, promoting inclusion is not corporate social responsibility for us. Not only is pushing for a world where everyone has access to the security, transparency, and control of digital payments the right thing to do, but it’s also critical to the future of business.

We’re proud that this commitment to new partnership models can be found at all levels of our company. Several of these partnerships have been highlighted in a joint report by Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion and the Institute for International Finance, entitled “How Financial Institutions and Fintechs are Partnering for Inclusion: Lessons from the Frontlines”. The report recognizes our collaboration with Kopo Kopo, a fintech start-up, and Diamond Trust Bank to create a QR-payment ecosystem in Kenya that allows customers to pay with their phones, by simply taking a photo of a QR code and manually entering the transaction amount.

Later this week, I’ll be speaking about ways financial institutions and fintechs can partner during a webinar hosted by the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.

Beyond our partnerships, we’ve done our own on-the-ground research. For example, we recently released a report that offer insights into how to build a digital payments ecosystem for small and micro businesses. To learn more about how we’re supporting financial inclusion across the company, watch this video.

Despite these gains, we still face a host of challenges in reaching the two billion people who are locked out of the formal financial system. At Mastercard, we know that the only way we will ever transform this equation is by creating partnerships that leverage relevant sector expertise, and that offer in-depth knowledge of base-of-the-pyramid needs – from health and education, to payments and digital finance.

It is perhaps the biggest ecosystem we have tried to build yet, but it is incumbent on all of us to do so. 200 years is too long to wait.

Read the original post on LinkedIn here.