The Spice Girls and the Sustainable Development Goals; Day 1 of the Social Good Summit.
The 2016 Social Good Summit kicked off with a few bars of music familiar to most any girl of my generation, The Spice Girls hit, “If you want to be my lover”. I instantly knew that this was not going to be a day of policy makers discussing theory. It was going to be a day of youthful action. I was not wrong.
The Social Good Summit is hosted by The United Nations Foundation and Mashable. It is organized around the theme of using technology and innovation to reach the sustainable development goals, a series of ambitious conditions the world is working to bring about by 2030.
The goals are diverse ranging from Quality Education (Goal 4) to Climate Action (Goal 13) and Partnerships for the Goals (Goal 17). The first three, No Poverty, Zero Hunger, and Good Health and Well-being focus on fundamental needs and seem to roll up the outcomes of the subsequent 14 goals. My primary focus is Goal 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth.
With such a broad range of topics to cover, I expected the conference to feel disjointed. How can you cover all these Goals in 2 days? And while the speakers highlighted the range of the goals, the conference, whether intentionally or by nature of a shifting focus in development, kept tying back to entrepreneurship.
Alan Kasujja talked about how in providing for the immediate needs of refugees, we fail to focus on the future. We give them some food and a blanket. We need to be educating them so that when they return to their home countries they have the tools for sustained political stability and economic growth. He cited Uganda as a model country for managing refugee populations and attributed their success to having leaders who themselves were once refugees.
The International Refugee Committee shared innovations in treating malnutrition at the community level, using design thinking to create around constraints such as distance to doctors and innumerate, illiterate community health workers.
The famous explorer, Betrand Piccard, who flew around the world in a solar power airplane, discussed that environmentalism used to be about asking people to forego, but now it is about giving them options to choose better. M. Sanjayan, the Executive Vice President of Conservation International, shared his experiences protecting reefs off of the coast of Papua New Guinea. What worked? Creating a financial incentive, keeping rewards in the local community, and engaging the people most affected by the changing ecosystem in designing and executing on the plan.
In the realm of health, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Deputy Chair of The Elders, reframed investing in health as investing in economic growth. And James Chau made it clear that if we wanted to stop the overuse and abuse of antibiotics we needed to stop buying those products, to stop creating demand.
Whether stated or implied, the principles of human centered design, consumer empowerment, market driven change, social entrepreneurship, and action were embedded in each speech no matter which goal the speaker was working towards.
There was also a refreshing feistiness to the tone of the conference. Chelsea Handler told us all the get on our soapboxes and scream. Julie Gichuru of Arimus Media made us focus on less sexy stories. Former President of Malawi, Dr. Joyce Banda, inspired us to create a critical mass of women at the top and to not dare kick down the ladder that we climbed up on. Barkha Dutt forced us to recognize and triumph over misogyny.
I left the day inspired to act, but also warned. When we are together, people who have chosen to dedicate two days, if not their lives, to working towards the sustainable development goals, it’s easy to think that the path is clear and the future that we want to see is imminent. The real test of these ideas, tools, and mindsets is when we bring them out to the real world. So in the spirit of entrepreneurialism, pick a goal, design a solution, and then get out there and get testing.
Let us know how you are working towards the sustainable development goals by posting a picture on Instagram, tagging @daretoinnovate #SDGs.
Meghan McCormick is the CEO and co-founder of Dare to Innovate, a youth-led movement to end unemployment in West Africa. She is a systems thinker, passionate about creating value for consumers, communities, and corporations. Meghan is currently a Legatum Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
