The largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world has launched a new strategy, aiming to help companies prioritize their actions to support achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and strengthen its accountability mechanisms after years of criticism.
The UN Global Compact, which launched in 2000, has a new direction, and its new leader, Sanda Ojiambo — now officially a year into the job — is looking to help companies navigate a changing world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is unfortunate that it did take the pandemic perhaps to raise this awareness around the issues,” Ojiambo told Devex in an interview. “But I think what is really interesting is that the key issues that have come to the fore, for example, realizing the fragility of supply chains, realizing the fragility of the [small and medium-sized enterprise] sector, realizing the fragility of a social safety net ... does create a platform to move forward on a lot of these key issues that are also key to our strategy as a whole.”