SDG 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Extreme poverty is defined as those who live on less than $2.15 per person per day. At the end of 2022, it was estimated that 8.4% of the world population or approximately 670 million people are living in extreme poverty.
Why is achieving no poverty important? Poverty heightens inequality which weakens social cohesion and severely affects economic growth. Not only is poverty unfair, but it also impacts society contributing to aspects such as malnutrition, lack of education, discrimination, increasing political and social tension, and worst, conflict. Poverty is bad for humans, and bad for business.
Many of us reading this, may not be directly affected by poverty, but your business may be seeking to expand, perhaps into an emerging market, where the population might be more affected by poverty.
To achieve this goal, we must work on addressing root causes of poverty which include but are not limited to:
- Lack of access to clean water and nutritious food – walking long distances to collect water every day often prevents women and girls from getting an education, thereby limiting their ability to get a job later in life. Without enough, nourishing food, a person does not have the strength or energy to work. This is not intermittent fasting, it is starvation.
- Conflict – The ongoing conflicts have highlighted the destruction and disruption that conflict has on society. Large-scale conflict stops society from progressing, destroys infrastructure, and forces families to flee and leave their assets behind.
- Climate Change – Climate events such as droughts, flooding, and natural disasters push already vulnerable people further into poverty often because they live season to season reliant on hunting and gathering to eat and make a living.
Despite the dark and heavy weight of this topic, organisations can contribute to the reduction of poverty by aligning their ESG efforts with SDG Goal 1:
- Energy companies can assist the financially vulnerable by providing assistance with utility bills and preventing energy cuts like Iberdrola (an energy company) that supported its especially vulnerable customers.
- Financial Services firms that enable financial inclusion by providing fast, easily accessible, cost-effective remittances for expats and immigrants to send money to their families back home, thereby enabling education and other dreams to be realised.
- Organisations such as the Global Girl Project know that one of the key’s to ending poverty is by enabling communities to transform themselves, and thus they focus on equipping girls to find their voice, enabling them to become a changemaker within their own community. When girls realise they have the power to change their own community, they can focus on education and breaking the cycle of poverty.
Ending poverty leads to stronger more cohesive societies, more prosperity, driving human and business benefits. Therefore, ending poverty in all forms everywhere requires the entire global community, private and public sectors to get involved, and this is why the United Nations (UN) set this goal as SDG 1 of the 17 goals.