The Sustainable Impact Hub (SIH) is bringing together stakeholders from international development and humanitarian organisations in Davos from 21–24 January 2020 to showcase the power of cross-sector collaboration. For the third consecutive year, 17 organisations have come together under Sustainable Development Goal 17 to ‘Accelerate cross-sector collaboration for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’.
The partners are promoting the inclusion of the world’s most vulnerable people in decision-making and implementation as a key value in all SDG-related activities, especially women, children and adolescents. The heads of the partner organisations invite global leaders in Davos to make this central to the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting on ‘Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World’.
2020 marks the beginning of the ten-year countdown for achieving the SDGs. The fastest path to achieving a better world by 2030 is by moving from short-term, small-scale partnership projects to long-term, transformational, multi-stakeholder partnerships with the potential for scalable impact.
“As we begin the 10-year countdown to 2030, UNICEF calls on global leaders and captains of industry to put children and young people at the centre of their actions and investments. We cannot realise the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals without supporting the health, education, protection and potential of our youngest generation.” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.
The SIH partners are encouraging diversity as an enabler of collaboration, not a constraint. The corporate and humanitarian and development communities must work together with governments and local communities to build trust and understanding. Each community has fundamentally different incentive structures, languages and cultures, but when they come together in new, collaborative ways the results can be positively transformational.
“430 million people will still be living in extreme poverty by 2030. Business as usual is no longer an option. The commitment we have all made to achieving the SDGs can only be met through collaboration, across multiple sectors. This includes development and humanitarian organisations, the private sector, multilateral finance institutions, local and national NGOs and civil society embracing partnerships. We need to question traditional paradigms and find new partners and new ways of working to harness the new leadership and expertise we all need.” said Sara Pantuliano, Chief Executive of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).
The Start Network joined as the most recent Sustainable Impact Hub partner to encourage collaboration for a better and more effective humanitarian system.
“Millions of people facing crises are left without help when they need it most. Communities find it harder to recover and protect themselves for the future. Addressing the change that is urgently needed in the global aid system, and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, can only be done by working together. We need radical action in the form of new business models, new mechanisms and new centres of gravity to meet the humanitarian challenges of today – and of the future.” said Christina Bennett, CEO of the Start Network.
The SDGs cannot be achieved unless we have stable and resilient societies, just as humanitarian needs cannot be met by humanitarian actors alone. The humanitarian system needs to evolve and innovate to enable more effective, forward-looking responses, in collaboration with affected people and new partners, including the local and multinational private sector.
Speaking of the interconnectedness of the two fields, Ignacio Packer, CEO of the International Council for Voluntary Agencies, said: “To achieve our SDGs we need also effective humanitarian action. Today more than ever effective humanitarian action requires new approaches to all dimensions of humanitarian assistance geared to unlocking system-wide participation. This means strengthening and brining in new expertise, methods, business models, incentive structures, cultures and accountability mechanisms.”
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The 2020 Sustainable Impact Hub Partners are the Connecting Business initiative, Elrha, ICVA, the IFRC, IOM, OCHA, ODI, the Partnership for Maternal Newborn & Child Health, the UN SDG Lab, the Start Network, the UN Foundation, UN Global Compact, UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, WHO, Philanthropy Advisors, Devex, Eurovision, GluoNNet, Gapeli and the World Economic Forum.